Biologists from several startups are applying the latest advances in genetic engineering to the age-old problem of baldness, creating new hair-forming cells that could restore a person’s ability to regrow hair. This is what is reported in a report by Antonio Regalado published on the site of the MIT Technology Review, the media of the prestigious American university.
Researchers told MIT Technology Review that they are using those techniques to grow human hair cells in laboratories and also on animals. A startup called dNovo sent Regalado a photograph of a guinea pig sprouting a dense clump of human hair, the result of what the company says is a human hair stem cell transplant.
The founder of the company is Ernesto Lujan, a biologist at Stanford University. He says that holding him can produce the components of hair follicles by genetically reprogramming ordinary cells, such as blood or fat cells. There is still a lot of work to be done, but Lujan is confident that the technology can eventually overcome “the root cause of hair loss”.
At birth, there are all the hair follicles that we will keep forever, but factors related to aging, cancer, testosterone, genetic bad luck, or even covid-19 can kill the stem cells that create hair within them. Once these stem cells are gone, the same goes for the hair. Lujan says his company can convert any cell directly into a hair stem cell by changing the patterns of the genes that are active in it. In biology, Lujan told Mit TR, “we now understand cells as a ‘state’ rather than a fixed identity and we can push cells from one state to another.”
Last August, MIT Technology Review reported on a rather mysterious company, Altos Labs, which plans to explore whether people can be rejuvenated using cell reprogramming. Another startup, Conception, is looking to extend the fertility period by converting blood cells into human eggs.
The key breakthrough came in the early 2000s, when Japanese researchers found a simple formula for turning any type of tissue into powerful embryo-like stem cells. The imagination is then unleashed. Scientists realized that they could potentially produce unlimited supplies of almost any type of cell, such as nerves or heart muscle.
In practice, however, the formula for producing specific types of cells can prove elusive, and then there is the problem of putting the cells grown in the laboratory back into the body. So far, there have been only a few demonstrations of reprogramming as a way to treat patients. Researchers in Japan have tried to transplant retinal cells into blind people. Then, last November, a US company, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, said it may have cured a man’s type 1 diabetes after an infusion of programmed beta cells, the type that responds to insulin.
The concept that startups are pursuing is to collect ordinary cells such as skin cells from patients and then convert them into hair-forming cells. In addition to dNovo, a company called Stemson (his name and the union of stems, stem cells, and Samson, has raised $ 22.5 million from backers including pharmaceutical company AbbVie. Co-founder and CEO Geoff Hamilton says that his company is transplanting reprogrammed cells into the skin of mice and pigs to test this technology.
There is a huge market at stake. About half of men suffer from male pattern baldness, some as early as the age of 20. When are women to lose them, the thinning is perceived as a strong blow to the self-image.
These companies, however, points out the American media, are exporting high-tech biology in a sector known for the many illusions spread in the past. False information on both hair loss remedies and stem cell potential is proliferating. “Beware of scams,” Paul Knoepfler, a stem cell biologist at UC Davis wrote in November. Hamilton, invited to deliver the keynote address at this year’s Global Hair Loss Summit, said he stressed that the company still has a lot of research to do. “We’ve seen so many [people] come and say they’ve found a solution. This has often happened in the hair, and so we have to take it into account, “he says.”
