The Burrill Report


Though it may be hard to imagine by looking at the mug shot to your left, the dashing author of this column at one time in his youth sported a pony tail. My days of long hair ended abruptly in college in a fit of mindfulness when I realized how much time I was actually spending thinking about my hair. Though it sits on top of your head, it can frankly be a pain in the ass.

Hair, in my younger days, meant many things to me. In the right places, it meant crossing the threshhold into manhood (or at least no longer being a child). It meant letting my freak flag fly and telling The Man that I was a free spirit even when nobody asked. Even now, when I find I don’t have hair where it’s supposed to be and increasingly in places I never imagined I’d find it, not having hair provide a certain freedom. A mere sweep of my $15 Wahl electric hair clipper with a number two comb sets me for three to four weeks in a matter of minutes without having to read People magazine at the local Supercuts.

The one thing I never considered for a moment was that my lack of hair was a condition in need of a cure. But the good folks at Columbia University Medical Center are boasting that “Researchers inch toward a cure for baldness.” A cure? You inch toward a cure for cancer. You inch toward a cure for Alzheimer’s. But baldness? Get a hat.

But baldness for some is a serious problem—not just for men, but women too. Women can suffer from alopecia areata, a condition in which the immune system attacks hair follicles and causes patches of hair loss. Hair transplants have been used to move follicles around the scalp to areas without hair, but that approach has its limits. The method that the researchers developed would not just relocate follicles from one part of the scalp to another, but generate new hair growth. The approach, they report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could significantly expand the use of hair transplantation to women with hair loss, who tend to have insufficient donor hair, as well as to men in the early stages of baldness.

“About 90 percent of women with hair loss are not strong candidates for hair transplantation surgery because of insufficient donor hair,” says co-study leader Angela Christiano, professor of dermatology and professor of genetics and development at Columbia University Medical Center. “This method offers the possibility of inducing large numbers of hair follicles or rejuvenating existing hair follicles, starting with cells grown from just a few hundred donor hairs. It could make hair transplantation available to individuals with a limited number of follicles, including those with female-pattern hair loss, scarring alopecia, and hair loss due to burns.”

Dermal papilla cells give rise to hair follicles. The thought of cloning hair follicles using inductive dermal papilla has been around for about 40 years, according to study co-leader Colin Jahoda, professor of stem cell sciences at Durham University, England, and co-director of North East England Stem Cell Institute. The problem, he says, is that once the dermal papilla cells are put into conventional, two-dimensional tissue culture, they revert to basic skin cells and lose their ability to produce hair follicles. “We were faced with a Catch-22: how to expand a sufficiently large number of cells for hair regeneration while retaining their inductive properties,” he says.

The researchers observed that rodent papillae can be harvested, expanded, and transplanted without problem. They surmised that unlike human papillae, rodent papillae spontaneously aggregate in tissue culture and that in so doing produce signals that reprogram skin cells to grow new follicles. They reasoned that if they cultured human papillae in such a way as to cause them to aggregate the way rodent cells do spontaneously, it could create the conditions needed to induce hair growth in human skin.

The researchers harvested dermal papillae from seven human donors and cloned the cells in tissue culture without adding growth factors to the cultures. They then transplanted the cultured papillae between the dermis and epidermis of human skin that had been grafted onto the backs of mice. In five of the seven tests, the transplants resulted in new hair growth that lasted at least six weeks.

“This approach has the potential to transform the medical treatment of hair loss,” says Christiano. “Current hair-loss medications tend to slow the loss of hair follicles or potentially stimulate the growth of existing hairs, but they do not create new hair follicles.”

The researchers caution that much work remains to be done. The research was published in a respectable journal and backed by a Science of Human Appearance Career Development Award from the Dermatology Foundation and by grants from the UK Medical Research Council, the Empire State Development's Division of Science, Technology and Innovation, New York Stem Cell Science, and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council in the UK, as well as earlier support from the Steven and Michele Kirsch Foundation. It drew much attention in the popular press celebrating the advance. But for me, I remain a bit puzzled.

Aside from the occasional sunburn on top of my scalp, I don’t miss the hair I’ve lost. In reality, I’d probably shave my head if it wasn’t for the fact that I grew a beard because I don’t like having to shave.

I don’t wish to belittle the accomplishment of these scientists or the anguish some people feel from the loss of their hair, but when I started writing about regenerative medicine however many years ago it was, and imagined the potential for turning treatments into cures, I had bigger things in mind than curing chrome dome.



October 24, 2013
http://www.burrillreport.com/article-hair_raising_research.html