Stem Cells Archives - Argyll Free Press

According to a team of Japanese researchers, it’s possible to grow a fully functional skin that has everything it needs, from hair follicles to sweat glands. Could this be a more effective treatment for people who deal with hair loss?

There are only a handful of treatments that deal with alopecia and other types of hair loss that occurs due to degradation of hair follicles in the skin.

But with the solution provided by these Japanese researchers, the new lab-grown skin might be able to offer new hope to those who want to cover their baldness.

Research leader Dr. Takashi Tsuji from the RIKEN Centre for Developmental Biology based in Kobe explains the newly designed skin has been fitted with fatty tissue and dermis, the layer where sweat glands and hair follicles are located.

This new technique has allowed the team to grow artificial skin successfully, mimicking the function of the natural tissue. Their developments contribute to the advancement of bioengineering technologies that will be included in regenerative therapies for patients with scars, burns, and alopecia.

For the lab-developed skin, researchers used certain chemicals to transform cells from mouse gums into stem cells. The newly created stem cells were then transplanted into another mouse for testing.

Just a few days later, the stem cells started transforming into skin tissue, which was then removed and implanted into the original mice. The new skin allowed the mice to sweat and grow hair, as the organ bonded well with the original skin and started the creation of new tissues.

The findings of the RIKEN Center, featured in Science Advances, represent a giant leap in “creating artificial human skin in the laboratory that contains all three natural skin layers, a handful of the usual glands and even hair follicles.”

Before this discovery, advancement in the field of artificial skin has been prevented by the fact that the skin didn’t contain the essential organs, such as hair follicles or sweat glands.

Scientists have previously created in a lab the epidermis – or the outer skin layer – but it could never work if it wasn’t complete with the missing organs and functions of the natural skin.

More than just help people dealing with hair loss, the development of the Japanese researchers represents good news for burn victims and other individuals who require skin transplants.
Image Source: Demand Studios

Researchers from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health have developed manmade artificial brains that could revolutionize neuroscience. However, they are not exact replicas of the human brain, but instead tiny models made of human neurons and cells that have the overall size of 350 micrometers and are made up of adult human stem cells.

The method that the scientists applied to create these tiny organs is by managing to make human skin cells act like stem cells, which then were made to morph to grow into brain cells.

Even if small in size, these tiny brains can actually be mass produced and could easily replace animal testing of drugs and study regarding numerous mental health disorders such as Alzheimer’s or autism. Because they exhibit characteristics very similar to the human brain, they can be easily used in laboratory experiments and probably end up earning better results than experimenting on lab rats for example.

These artificial brains are also called organoids and elicit much better results and responses to treatments whenever the scientists attempt to test a drug on them, simply due to the resemblance to how real, full-fledged human brains work.

However, these miniscule brains do take roughly 10 weeks spent in special incubators to finally develop into an organ that could be experimented and tested on. Researchers said that while testing drugs and studying their effect on rodent brains has earned some results too, humans function differently than the lab rats do and because of that, results will differ on way too many occasions – roughly 95%.

One could argue that the tiny brains could not be a fair representation of a full-fledged, real scale brain, but as long as they are made from human cells and are bound to react in the same way as the real thing, they are a lot more likely to return more accurate results.

The best part about the ability to create these small-scale brains is the fact that researchers can downright take cells from a patient with a particular genetic disorder to create a tiny replica of his brain and be able to easily target the particular mechanisms of it in order to triangulate the phenomenon better.

This is what the scientists reported after only the first phase of the experiment with the stem-cell based tiny brains. In time, the technology could mature to a level where the replicas would be a lot more accurate and be able to mimic the way the human brain works even better. This could lead to numerous breakthroughs in neuroscience and its implications in a great number of mental illnesses.

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Japanese Researchers Grow Fully-functioning Skin in Lab

Manmade Artificial Brains That Could Revolutionize Neuroscience

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