Cloning Hair
The thought of being able to culture hair follicles and have an unlimited donor supply has been a long-time dream of patients with hair loss and hair restoration surgeons alike. The obstacles, however, have seemed enormous since the hair follicle is a very complex structure of skin cells, blood vessels, nerves, muscles, and glands. (As an analogy, culturing a hair follicle would be more like culturing an entire eyeball rather than just the cells of the cornea.) Now there is hope that not only is cloning possible, but that this hair may not even need to be your own.
Dr. Colin Jahoda, a British scientist recently reported that he took dermal sheath cells (cells from the lowest part of the hair follicle) from his own scalp and transplanted them into his wife's forearm. These implanted cells then stimulated his wife's skin to grow new hair. The hair was analyzed by Dr. Angela Christiano at Columbia University in New York and was show to be composed of cells with Dr. Jahoda's XY chromosomes at the bottom and his wife's XX chromosomes at the top.
This clever experiment shows that the hair follicle's dermal sheaths cells are one of the bodies "immune privileged" organs, enabling them to be transplanted from one person to another without rejection. More importantly, this study suggests that all one might need to do is to transplant these "inducer" cells to stimulate new hair growth, rather than having to transplant the entire follicle itself. The great significance, for those that are balding, is that these cells may some day be cultured in the lab, to produce a potentially unlimited supply of hair.
Although, this was just one preliminary study, the work provides a clear direction for further cloning research and gives considerable hope that the technology may be available in the not too distant future. Stay tuned!
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