Hair Cloning and Cell Therapy

Undoubtedly, the most common question I seem to be asked is "When is hair cloning going to be available?" All I can answer is, "Soon, but we still have many obstacles to overcome."

In an article in The Journal of Science, September 2004, Dr. Elaine Fuchs and her colleagues from Rockefeller University in New York described how they took a single stem cell from the hair follicle of a mouse and grew it into millions of cells in a dish. They then grafted the cells onto mice that are genetically hairless, and soon saw new skin, oil glands and fuzzy hair. This is the best demonstration yet that a single adult stem cell can regenerate all the skin's structures. What it actually shows is that hair follicle cells from mice can be separated from the follicle and multiply into millions of cells, which when injected back into the mouse, will produce hair. However, that's a mouse.

The great difficulty with human hair cell therapy (not cloning per se) has been the inability to take the hair follicle cells from a human, multiply these cells, and have them retain the ability to grow hair in the human. There are two companies today that are leaders in hair cell therapy research, and their work is quite advanced. However, actual treatment may still be 5-10 years away. The reason is that cell multiplication methods in humans differ from mice in that this form of extraction on human hair follicles actually result in the loss of the cell's ability to produce new hair. So, researchers continue to work hard to overcome these obstacles.

Add to that the time it takes to perform clinical trials, to show safety as well as effectiveness, and the medical regulatory process, and you can understand the roadblocks these researchers must overcome. These cells also must show that they are not capable of transmitting any diseases or cause any type of cancer or tumor.

The technique now projected involves the surgeon removing approximately 100 follicles from the patient in the traditional way, then isolating the cells from the follicles, and culturing (multiplying) them for approximately 3-4 weeks. Then, the cells would be returned to the clinic from the laboratory, to be injected into the patient's scalp in order to grow hair.

Since it appears that controlling the direction of hair growth and texture may be difficult with cell injections, cell therapy was first thought to be a good solution for 'filler hair' that could add density to traditional transplants. By utilizing both techniques, the surgeon could skillfully focus on the strategic placements of fine transplants to create the most aesthetically natural hairline, with cell therapy with the 'cloned' cells injected into cosmetically less critical areas.

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