Without use of drugs
Associated Press
(The Frederick Post, Frederick, MD., Thursday, November 4, 1999)

Scientists transplanted scalp cells from one person to another and, for the first time ever, grew new hair on a human without the use of drugs.

The approach could some day enable just about any head to sprout hair, researchers said.

It also raises hope of someday spurring the growth of new tissue or even whole organs inside patients. Such as cartilage in arthritic joints.

"You can use a few cells to basically regenerate an entire organ. To me that’s the mind blowing part," said Angela Christiano, A Columbia University baldness researcher who did the genetic analysis for the British experiment, reported in the Thursday’s issue of the Journal Nature.

The researchers, led by biologists Colin Jahoda at Durham University, in England, took cells at the bottom of hair pores- or follicles- from Mr. Jahoda’s own scalp and from a colleague’s. These cells from the so called dermal sheath were then transplanted into the forearm of Mr. Jahoda’s wife.

Within five weeks, the transplanted tissue-no bigger than the head of a pin- made a total of five fully grown hairs in the woman’s arm.

The transplanted tissue "is telling the cells of the recipient: You will make a hair follicle," Mr. Jahoda said. The new hair was genetically male. It was longer, thicker and darker than arm hair, but it combined some characteristics of both donor and recipient.

Such success had been achieved before only in animal experiments.

Current baldness treatment include hair grafts and certain drugs. Drugs can slow hair loss or even produce new hair, but only in a limited number of people. In grafts, hair is lifted from one section of a man’s scalp and transplanted whole into a bald spot in his head. However, the process requires a slow, expensive, and potentially painful series of operations.

The new work suggests the possibility of a quicker procedure with less cutting and the creation of new hair in just about anyone. The cells could be removed from a person’s own scalp o, if that person cannot produce good quality cells , they could be collected from someone else. They could then be multiplied through laboratory cloning before being transplanted.

Taupees are not out yet, however. It is not yet clear whether such newly grown hair will last, pop up at the correct angle, and satisfy several other requirements for cosmetically acceptable treatments, researchers said. The microsurgery used in the experiment is complex, too.

The research buttresses the theory that transplanted hair cells somehow bypass the body’s normal rejection mechanism for foreign tissue.

The researchers picked Mr. Jahoda’s wife partly because she is not related by blood to him or the other donor. Yet she showed no signs of tissue rejection.