A squad of researchers from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles has managed to grow hair beginning from stem cells, revealing key molecular events involved in hair growth and stimulating it in grown-up mice.

The new research, which has been printed in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offers a step-by-step clarification of the procedure via which hair grows. The findings overlay the way for hair growth stimulation in patients with alopecia or male pattern baldness. A team of researchers set off to examine how follicles grow out of the skin and how they generate hair by using so-called organoids, which are bunches of stem cells grown in vitro that can self-organize into an organ-like structure. They used the 3-D structure of organoids to gain an improved understanding of a certain organ, as they have similar properties to the organ it emulates – which, in this case, is the human skin. The study’s first author is Mingxing Lei, a postdoctoral researcher in the University of Southern California’s (USC) Stem Cell laboratory.

Stimulating Hair Growth

By obstructing the activity of certain genes at diversephases in the development of the organoid, the scientists were able to explain their role in transitioning from one stage to the next.”Our examination explicates a relay of molecular events and biophysical procedures at the core of the self-organization process during tissue morphogenesis,” write the authors. “Molecules key to the multistage morphological transition are recognized and can be added or inhibited to reinstate the hindered process in adult cells.”In fact, Lei and colleagues applied this recently acquired molecular and genetic knowledge to organoids fashioned from adult skin cells, in an effort to bump-start the hair growth procedure.Considerably, Lei and team could efficaciously stimulate hair growth in these organoids. Adult organoids managed to create 40 percent as much hair as the organoids derived from newborns.”Usually, lots of aging folks do not grow hair well, since adult cells gradually lose their regenerative aptitude,” clarifies senior author Prof. Cheng-Ming Chuong, of USC’s Keck School of Medicine. However, he enlightens that his team’s findings have inferences that could change this.”With our new findings, we are able to make adult mouse cells yield hair again. At some point, this work can stimulate a strategy for stimulating hair growth in patients with disorders ranging from alopecia to baldness.”

The Six-Step Process of Hair Growth

Lei and team used skin organoids derived from both newborn and adult skin cells. Especially, they used progenitor cells, which are a kind of cell that is more segregated than stem cells. They distanced these from newborn and adult skin and then resettled them into nude mice. The researchers then took detailed time-lapse pictures of the 3-D cultures to see how the cells act and how hair development occurs.Lei and colleagues were able to see that the newborn cells formed skin-like organoids in a six-step procedure that started with the distanced progenitor cells (step one), which soon aggregated (step two). These aggregated cells then turned into polarized cysts (step three), which then transmuted into so-called coalesced cysts (step four), which went on to form planar skin (step five).In the final step of the procedure, the skin formed follicles (step six), which were relocated into a mouse. Here, they formed hair.By contrast, the researchers found, distanced progenitor skin cells from an adult mouse neither moved past the accumulation stage nor produced any hair.Lei and colleagues went on to study the molecular and biophysical proceedings that buttressed this six-step hair growth course, clarifying that the researchers “used a grouping of bioinformatics and molecular screenings” to unknot these mechanisms. They found augmented activity in numerous genes, including those involved in the production of collagen – the fibrous protein that can be found in the skin and other connective tissues – and insulin, which is the hormone that normalizes the levels of sugar in our bloodstream.