Maybe someone finds it intreresting to read. To me it’s too technical and my English isn’t good enough.
Fabrication of a 3D hair follicle-like hydrogel by soft lithography
They created a new technology in Singapore which basically creates a small microstructure. They then take a specific type of cell and culture it in this specific shape similar to what happens in a real hair follicle. Once the cells are lined up a certain way the all begin to create a hair follicle. The cultured follicle can then be transplanted into the donor’s own scalp.
There is a catch, 50% of the hairs don’t make it after 14 days.
Nice…
a lot of hair research.
Maybe in 10 years we´ll have something!
This is a great idea, and a number of researchers have considered this prospect. Dr. Lauster is one of them.
However, the more I think about this in detail, the more I think it will take a long time to develop this into something really viable – real growing artificial (but organic) human hair follicles that are cosmetically useful.
If you read the article, it doesn’t seem that after the experiment was finished, they were even close to this point.
The truth is the hair follicle is EXCEEDINGLY complicated, and just putting cells together in a well doesn’t ensure they’ll cooperate, grow together, unite to form a growing hair follicle that can cycle, etc. The cells have no “incentive” to spontaneously come together in this way under laboratory conditions.
I don’t mean to be negative, but I think this will take 15 years at least.
Whatever. It’s just the same old story.
“We don’t even really understand, let alone know how to fix, the problem that is slowly wearing down your existing follicles. But don’t worry, we think we are closer to being able to grow you all-new ones from scratch and make them work fine.”
IMHO this mindset doesn’t come any closer to making sense today than it did 10 or 20 years ago. It’s still a bunch of researchers trying to make their desired solution fit onto our problem instead of trying to understand our problem before deciding how to fix it.