A cure for baldness has long eluded scientists, but a group of researchers say they have created a first-of-its-kind hair-restoration method that may actually get a person to grow new hair. This could be especially helpful for women, burn victims and other hair-loss patients who can’t be helped with traditional hair-loss methods.
“It’s really amazing because, right now, the transplantation of hair is really just a relocation,” said LaPook. “You take hair, generally from the back of the scalp to the front, but you’re limited by the number of follicles. Well, what a very clever group at Columbia University Medical Center did … is that they went to the cells at the base of the hair, and they took them outside, put them in a petri dish and multiplied them and created a lot more of the cells that then make the follicles, and then they were able to put them back into human, bald skin that was grafted onto the back of mice; four to six weeks later – hair.”
The hair was like “baby hair,” LaPook said. “But they think over time they’ll figure out a way to get it. They also don’t know after the first hair falls out, will another one grow back, but it’s really fascinating.”