Hair cloning breakthrough

Has it ever occurred to you that we have been cloning animals for about 26 years now, but what about just cloning our own hair? Isn’t it easier? Junji Fukuda, PhD, professor, at Yokohama National University made a ricent breakethough: he reports that his group was able to increase the probability of hair formation in a cell culture from less than 1% — one out of 300 cell aggregates — at the beginning of the research to almost 100% — or 300 out of 300 cell aggregates. They were able to create these tiny hair follicles by controlling the structure created by those back-and-forth communications between embryonic cells by way of a “low concentration of extracellular matrices,” which is the network in your body that offers structure for your tissue and cells. The team grew hair shafts and hair follicles “with almost 100% efficiency,” generating “fully mature hair follicles with long hair shafts,” according to the release. Let’s hope that in the next decade this scientific breakthrough will be transferred from laboratories to clinics where it will be available to everyone.