Functional hair follicle regeneration

Abstract

The hair organ plays biologically important roles in thermoregulation, physical insulation, waterproofing, tactile sensation, protection, camouflage, and social communication. Only the hair follicle, which is induced by reciprocal epithelial and mesenchymal interactions in the skin field, has various organ-inductive potential stem cells and their niches and undergoes repeated organogenesis after birth through interactions between epithelial stem cells in the bulge region and dermal papillae. Hair loss disorders such as androgenetic alopecia are psychologically distressing and have negative effects on the quality of life. Therefore, the development of hair follicle regeneration therapy is expected to be a next-generation organ replacement regenerative therapy. Previously, many studies have reported technological approaches to reproduce de novo folliculogenesis. Recently, we successfully developed fully functional hair regeneration via intracutaneous transplantation of a bioengineered hair follicle germ, which was reconstituted from adult hair follicle-derived stem cells using our developed organ germ method. Here, we review hair follicle regeneration studies and discuss the potential of our functional hair follicle regeneration for the realization of future hair follicle organ regenerative therapy.