A recent study has shown that it’s possible to grow new hair follicles from the cells of human skin. The researchers claim that the discovery can give hopes to the people who are suffering from chronic hair loss. The outcomes promise to break an age-old deadlock to regenerate the essential structures in the human skin that leads to the hair growth. In the near future, it could lead to various therapies to treat effectively undesirable baldness, especially in women.

It’s almost impossible to create a replica of human hair follicles in the laboratory. However, the latest technique has proved that the human hair follicles can be triggered to grow in skin tissues and used to build hair shafts. Unlike the traditional hair transplants where many hair follicles are transplanted from the donor site to the recipient site, the radical new therapy involves the patient’s own skin tissue to produce limitless hair follicles required for transplantation.

The hair transplant in Kolkata has witnessed a great upsurge in the recent years. It is constantly updating itself with the state-of the-art technology and if you’re a resident of Kolkata, then, you will soon be able to avail the facilities of the discovery.

According to an Anglo-American researchers’ team, the study represents a ‘milestone advance’ to activate hair growth in alopecia women, burns victims, as well as to treat male pattern baldness. Professor Angela Christiano of Columbia University, New York, said, “The hair loss medications available today though prevents the falling out of the hair, yet they cannot produce new hair follicles.”“On the contrary, our technique has the potentiality to grow new follicles literally by using the cells of the patients. The step taken towards it could greatly broaden the applicability of hair restorative surgery to younger patients and to women. At present, the process is restricted to treat male pattern baldness in people with health issues,” she added.

Approximately, 4 out of every 5 women who suffer from hair loss are not eligible to undergo hair transplant in Kolkata, as they do not have enough hair follicles elsewhere in their body like men. But now, the process of generating large number of new follicles from the few existing donor hairs is only a hair’s breadth away after the discovery. Special cells known as dermal papillae can be injected into the laboratory rats to create new follicles. However, when the human dermal papilla cells were compelled to grow in the flat conventional dishes, they do not respond as the rat cells. But, when these cells were shifted to three-dimensional “globoid”- drops falling off from a glass slide- these human cells can be re-programmed into dermal papillae of the rats to stimulate the growth of fresh follicles when transplanted into human skin, grown on the backs of mice.

For the research, seven people donated their skin cells. It was found that the skin cells taken from five people out of seven, has led to the regrowth of human hair from the new follicles on the back of the experimental mice. These hairs lasted for about six weeks.