Jay Leno — a former host of US talk show The Tonight Show — joked that scientists “cured baldness … at least in mice”. Now, we may be able to cure baldness… in humans! Using stem cells that develop into skin-like structures in vitro (which means, “performed or taking place in a test tube, culture dish, or elsewhere outside a living organism“) the stuff of the future may become reality! The research still has a lot of caveats, but progress is being made. In their Nature article the scientists show that skin organoids form planar hair-bearing skin when grafted onto mice. Their results demonstrate that nearly complete skin can self-assemble in vitro and can be potentially used to reconstitute skin in vivo (which means “(of a process) performed or taking place in a living organism”). The researchers anticipate that the skin organoids will provide a foundation for treating baldness. Read more
Sources: Lee, J., Rabbani, C.C., Gao, H. et al. Hair-bearing human skin generated entirely from pluripotent stem cells. Nature (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2352-3