Whether you're a burn victim or just prematurely balding, scientists may soon be able to help you regenerate lost patches of your hair and skin. And they'll only need a drop of your blood to start.

A team of Japanese biomedical researchers—led by Ryoji Takagi, at the Tokyo University of Science, in Japan—have just made a major breakthrough in regenerating the largest organ on the human body: skin. As they explain in a new paper in the journal Science Advances, the scientists have developed a new method to grow 3D layers of skin and hair cells from stem cells—which are genetically engineered from adult tissue.

The scientists' lab-grown skin includes all three layers of skin cells, as well as sweat glands, hair follicles, and your skin's oil-producing glands called sebaceous glands. That's far and away more complex than the next best attempt to artificially regenerate skin, which only includes two types of skin cells.

Gums to Skin

To test their new skin, the Japanese researchers took a DNA sample from a bald, adult mouse, built a chunk of skin with it, and successfully implanted skin back in the mouse, where it thrived and grew hair. The skin and hair prospered over the entire 70 day period it was meant to last.

Although the new skin generating process has only been tested on rodents so far, "we think that further studies … would lead to clinical applications for severe burned patients and severe hair loss," says Miho Ogawa, a researcher with the team at the private research foundation RIKEN, in Tokyo. Ogawa estimates the first human trials will come within the next 10 years.

To build their multi-layered suite of skin cells, Takagi's colleagues first collect a small sample of adult tissue. This can be as simple as taking a drop of blood. Although, for their mice, Takagi's team scrapes away a tiny bit of mouse's gums.

The scientists are then able to genetically engineer those adult cells to revert into stem cells that share the donor's DNA. It's a process first developed in 2006, (where it won two researchers, Shinya Yamanaka and Sir John Gurdon, the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.) The engineered cells are called induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells.

Takagi's team's breakthrough is that they've found a way to nurture those iPS cells to generate into a package of skin and hair cells. This is done by growing the stem cells in what are basically just Petri dishes infused with the right combination of chemical signals. This tricks the iPS cells into thinking they need to start forming skin, which Takagi's team can harvest in chucks containing between one and two dozen hair follicles.

Using this same adult-derived stem cell process, Ogawa explains that she and her colleagues are also now looking at ways to regenerate various parts of your mouth. Including teeth and salivary glands.

With these, the skin, and last month's breakthrough with eye tissue, we're hoping that by next Christmas we'll finally get that little brother we always wanted.

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