There was an interesting study done recently at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. There were articles published about the study in the journal Nature and for Reuters Healthdescribing how scientists discovered that mice with deep skin wounds can regrow hair. The dermatology professor who led the study, Dr. George Cotsareli, would like to see the idea of applying compounds to get epidermal cells to turn into hair follicles to become a precedent for future remedies for male-pattern baldness and similar causes for hair loss.
Dr. Cotsareli cautions that the time frame for seeing such ideas become marketable might not even begin for up to five more years as further research is done. Dr. Cheng-Ming debated that while the study might show that hair could grow from adult skin, the data was still inconclusive because human skin is different from that of the mice on which the experiments were performed. Dr. Cheng-Ming is a professor of pathology at the University of Southern California, though he was not actually involved in the study itself.
Both doctors felt that regenerative and repairative tissue were vitally important to this process of hair growth beginning at the locations of the wounds. It is still not decided whether or not the epidermal cells would turn into hair follicles in humans if the wounds were not allowed a comparative amount of time to heal as in the case of the mice.
Dr. Cotsareli cautions that the time frame for seeing such ideas become marketable might not even begin for up to five more years as further research is done. Dr. Cheng-Ming debated that while the study might show that hair could grow from adult skin, the data was still inconclusive because human skin is different from that of the mice on which the experiments were performed. Dr. Cheng-Ming is a professor of pathology at the University of Southern California, though he was not actually involved in the study itself.
Both doctors felt that regenerative and repairative tissue were vitally important to this process of hair growth beginning at the locations of the wounds. It is still not decided whether or not the epidermal cells would turn into hair follicles in humans if the wounds were not allowed a comparative amount of time to heal as in the case of the mice.
