New human hair growth has been generated for the first time by an international team of researchers from Columbia University in the U.S. and Durham University in the U.K.

Leading epidermal stem cell expert Elaine Fuchs of Rockefeller University calls the development “significant.” Fuchs, who was not involved in the current study, says it raises “tantalizing new prospects for future research.”

Currently, baldness can be tackled with hair transplants from one area of patients’ scalps to another. But this process does not involve creating new hair, and can leave scars. Furthermore, it doesn’t help those who have little hair to spare, such as women with baldness problems.

The transplants contain critical dermal papilla cells, which receive cues to grow hair follicle cells from epithelial stem cells.

But through the years, whenever researchers have tried to actually grow new hairs in a petri dish, so they can prompt new hair to grow in patients, they have failed. Transferring the cells from the 3-D environment of the scalp to the 2-D environment of the typical Petri dish causes them to lose the ability to grow hair follicles, reverting to basic skin cells.

So, Columbia University professor of genetics and development Angela Christiano— who has discovered hair-specific genes— along with Durham University professor of stem cell sciences Colin Jahoda, decided to go 3-D. Jahoda had been intrigued that rodent papilla cells form clumps in culture, unlike human cells. So Jahoda, who is also co-director of the North East England Stem Cell Institute, created clumps.

He popped 3,000 papilla cells into drops of cultures on dish lids, then turned the lids over, so they were hanging. The 3,000 cells moved to the bottom of the drops, as they apparently do in the scalp. The proximity of the cells to each other, in that particular way, worked. When papilla cells were taken from seven patients, placed in hanging drops, and then shot into hairless human foreskin grafted on the backs of mice, new human hair cells grew in five of seven grafts.

“Previously, researchers have attempted, with little success, to maintain the inductive capacity of dermal papilla cells in culture,” says Fuchs, who is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “Here, the Christiano and Jahoda groups join forces to tackle this hurdle by maintaining human scalp dermal papilla in 3-D cultures. Although the efficiency of inductivity varied considerably between donors, for some patient volunteers, 60 percent of the cultured dermal papilla appeared to maintain at least some inductive capability sustained for some months after engraftment onto immune-compromised mice. Although it is too early to say whether the findings will ultimately be useful for hair transplantations, or whether the cells can be effective in hair follicle neo-genesis in non-hairy skin, the work does represent a significant advance in the field.”

Many have tried 3-D culture in the past, Fuchs adds. But “the approach this group used appears to be particularly effective.”

The paper was published in a recent Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The Columbia and Durham groups are working now to improve the hair creation process. Right now, they are not getting large quantities of hair. But they are only turning on 22 percent of the genes that are normally expressed. Flipping the switch on more of those genes may result in larger batches of hair.

Beyond its potential as an approach that could vastly improve upon the hair transfer approach for men, it could immensely help the 90 percent of women with hair loss who aren’t good candidates for hair transference because of inadequate numbers of donor hairs. The group says the new technique may ultimately let them grow large numbers of hair follicles, starting with a small number of donor hairs. The technique could also benefit patients with scarring alopecia, and hair loss due to burns.