In the News – Balding and Stem Cells

Snippet from the article:

An inability of stem cells in the scalp to develop into the type of cells that make hair follicles may be an underlying cause of male-pattern baldness, according to a new study. The discovery gives hope that people who are bald could regrow their hair with a future treatment, said study researcher Dr. George Cotsarelis, a professor of dermatology at the University of Pennsylvania.

In people who are bald, hair follicles have shrunken and become microscopic, Cotsarelis said. And scientists long thought that bald people also had a depletion of hair follicle stem cells, which are necessary to grow hair.

But the new study shows that bald people have the same number of stem cells as those with hair. So if scientists could coax the stem cells into producing more hair follicle progenitor cells, then it would be possible to generate bigger hair follicles that could grow hair, he said.

Read the full story at Livescience.com– Balding may be a stem cell problem

Our work on using plucked hair to grow a new hair in the balding area may touch on the subject material mentioned in that article. With new hairs growing from plucked hairs, does this mean that the new hair came from the plucked hair and its stem cells — or do the stem cells in the recipient plucked hair area stimulate the original hair to grow from “the stem cells which were unable to complete their normal development and become hair follicle progenitor cells“?

There is still much to learn here, but we have suspected for a long time that the bald areas contain the elements that can grow hair, but because of various defects that are described in brief in the reference here, they just don’t grow. I can imagine that some day we will harvest stem cells in enough quantity such that injecting them into the bald skin may bring back the original hair and cure baldness permanently. More research is surely needed and being done as this is the big lotto hit.