We're not talking about trying to recreate a whole person from a single hair follicle, so the challenge isn't nearly as great as it was to make an entire organism from one cell. What we want to be able to do is use your body's own cells to regenerate structures that have begun to atrophy or die. The technology is being widely applied in many areas of medicine, and involves trying to get your body to do what it knows how to do, but for some reason cannot anymore.
Q: Are you actually growing hair in the lab? Or just cells?
ANGELA CHRISTIANO, PhD: One of the great limitations of hair biology is that we don't yet know how to grow a hair in a dish, and if we did we'd be in a lot better shape. Right now we have no good way to do that, so what we're really just hoping to do is to culture the important cells-the germinative cells-and then reimplant those into the scalp, and then to let nature take its course, to basically allow those cells to induce a brand-new hair follicle.
Q: Has this been done?
ANGELA CHRISTIANO, PhD: In theory, it's already been done. Last year, a paper was published in Nature which showed that between a different donor and a different recipient, those particular cells could be implanted in the forearm of the recipient, and even in an area where no hair usually grows, those cells were powerful enough to induce a new hair follicle.
No one has successfully done it on a large scale. If you use your own cells, of course the hair should be the same color, but there's the question of growth direction, and the most important question with the new hair is actually cycle-or whether or not it will have the ability to grow back once it's fallen out.
