In the News – Tissue Engineering and Follicle Regeneration
Snippet from the article:
A hair-raising trick may lead to better hair transplants. Engineered hair follicles patched into skin can be coaxed to connect to surrounding tissue and to grow hair in an organized way, a study in mice finds.
Unlike current hair transplant methods, which simply move existing hair follicles from one area of the scalp to another to cover a bald region, the approach would spur the creation of new hair follicles from existing cells.
Read the rest — Engineering better hair transplants
Progress moves slowly and consistent in the direction of solutions that will eventually allow doctors to produce the entire hair organ, essentially producing new hair. These articles are very exciting. To quote from the Nature Communications article: “Concepts in current regenerative therapy include stem cell transplantation and two-dimensional uniform cell sheet technologies, both of which have the potential to restore partially lost tissue or organ function” such as hair. The article demonstrates “fully functional orthotopic hair regeneration via the intracutaneous transplantation of bioengineered hair follicle germ” (i.e. stem cells).
In the discussion, the author Koh-ei Toyoshima et. al. states: “In this study, we successfully demonstrate fully functional bioengineered hair follicle regeneration that produces follicles that can repeat the hair cycle, connect properly with surrounding skin tissues and achieve piloerection. This regeneration occurs through the rearrangement of various follicular stem cells and their niches. These findings significantly advance the technological development of bioengineered hair follicle regenerative therapy.”
Blah! Blah! Blah!
More garbage to create excitement and stir the pot…But never any substance.
Approved therapies typically take $1 billion and 12 years from discovery to development. What Dr R has reported is a significant and substantive scientific finding, but readers often do not understand the long process of discovery (test tube), animal toxicology, safety and efficacy, manufacturing, dosing, early human testing, and confirmatory testing, etc. Each step leads to more failures than successes, which is why only 20-30 drugs are approved each year in the US (despite billions of dollars spent on research and development). So, those who feel disappointed that the “pot (has been) stirred†may not fully appreciate that these are early, early, early, scientific findings that do not simply translate into human application But, that is also where successful therapies start.
Sad that people have no understanding of the scientific method or the progress of research. Would you want to have an unlicensed unproven medical procedure performed just to get your hair back? What if it caused you terrible, irreversible harm? I would love to have my full juvenile hairline restored with permanent transplants of freshly ‘grown’ unending supplies of hair – but I’d want to see it tested and approved before I was a guinea pig.
This blog is an excellent source of news and information. I’m not sure what benefit it would do Dr Rs practice to lie about these things. Surely he’s just offering news as it becomes available. It’s not like he’s offering a surgery based on hearsay and unfounded research.
Give it time.