Additive technique used to create optimised environment for growing human hair in petri dish

Angela Christiano, a professor of dermatology at Columbia’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, has been working with colleagues including Colin Jahoda, a bioscientist from Durham University, to use 3D printers to replicate the shape of the environment in which follicular cells develop in hair bearing skin. The wells in which the cells were cultured had a long, thin extension half a millimetre wide above the cell. The team put hair follicle cells into the wells and then placed more keratin producing cells on top. The wells were then dosed with growth factors to encourage hair production. After a three-week culturing period, hair began to grow.

Professor Christiano said: “What we’ve shown is that we can basically create a hair farm, a grid of hairs that are patterned correctly and engineered so they can be transplanted back into that same patient’s scalp. That expands the availability of hair restoration to all patients – including the 30 million women in the United States who experience hair thinning and young men whose hairlines are still receding. Hair restoration surgery would no longer be limited by the number of donor hairs.”