Have comb-overs, toupees and hair transplants had their day? In the latest salvo in the battle against baldness, French beauty group L’Oréal wants to develop a grow-your-own hair kit that will use a special bioprinter to create living hair follicles.
Regrowing hair naturally has long been a challenge for biologists because the hair follicle is one of the most complex in the human body. It is made up of about 15 different cell types and at least five separate layers, each with its own function. The tiny organ produces hair but also has to produce the first layer of the skin.
Biosynthetic hair follicles can tackle baldness, which researchers have tried to cure for at least four decades.
It will also act as a realistic human model for L’Oréal to test new hair chemicals and products in its labs.
"This is a good way to screen potential drugs and find new unknown agents that stimulate hair growth, which is the holy grail," said Denis Headon, a developmental biologist specialising in skin and hair at Edinburgh University.
Today’s remedies for baldness consist of hormonal creams to slow hair loss and hair transplant therapy, where healthy follicles are uprooted from a fertile spot and replanted into a balding spot.
“This is just rearranging what people have. It’s not regrowing new hair,” said Dr Headon.
Laser technology
In a multiyear research partnership, L'Oréal teamed up with French biotechnology start-up Poietis, which uses laser technology to bioprint delicate human tissues.
"The idea is to achieve something that has never been done before: to bio-print the tiny organ itself, the follicle rather than the hair," said Patricia Pineau at L'Oréal.
The printer can position cells in three dimensions in extremely high detail - to 10 microns - and layer tiny drops of cells in the exact arrangement required to create a living tissue. This year, Poietis became the first company to 3D bioprint human skin using lasers.
While skin is flat and has a straightforward layered structure, hair follicles are three dimensional and have to tunnel through the skin. An artificial follicle cannot just be a static 3D structure; it needs to develop and change over time, adding an extra layer of complexity.
"Printing an accurate living follicle is extremely difficult, mainly because there are several cell types involved, and heterogeneity between follicles and fibre types on the body," said Claire Higgins, an Imperial College bioengineer who specialises in human hair.
“[But] even a simple model that could be used to assess dialogue between cell types will be a technological advance and a useful tool for drug discovery.”
Human tissue
This is not the first time L’Oréal has experimented with human tissue engineering. It has been able to grow artificial skin in a lab over the past 20 years and has its own artificial skin bio-printer.
“We recently rebuilt Chinese skin, which behaves differently to Caucasian skin. It develops wrinkles later in life and dark spots earlier in life,” Ms Pineau said. “We have recreated skin in the lab, and next we are looking at hair engineering.”
There are 10 research teams around the world racing to achieve natural hair growth in laboratories from the UK to Russia, Japan and the US.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2016
