L’Oreal Shares Hair Cloning Poster

Today, I’m happy to be sharing a “never seen online before” poster of a L’Oreal research project involving the creation of hair follicle organoids in a dish. This type of work is commonly referred to as “hair cloning” – the ability to create brand new hair follicles outside the body using various types of follicle cells and stem cells.

For the past several years it’s been known that L’Oreal has embarked on a research collaboration with the biopriting specialist company Poietis for the purpose of 3D-printing hair follicles.. Now, for the first time we are seeing the work that L’Oreal has been putting in on their end to develop a “hair follicle cultivation” model. And for those wondering, yes, the work below involves all human cells.



The text on the poster is difficult to read unless you’ve enlarged the image by clicking on it. I’ll share the introduction of the poster here:

“Mammalian hair follicle morphogenesis results of highly complex and coordinated interactions between epithelial and mesenchymal cells, which, when injected into mouse skin, conduct to hair follicle neo-genesis.

Recently, several hair follicle organoids were reported:

– in vitro 3D hair follicle germ structures from mouse embryonic cells were obtained and resulted in de novo hair follicles growth when injected (1).

– Preliminary results showed that in vitro combinations of human outer root sheath keratinocytes and dermal papilla fibroblasts led to long rod organoid structures (2,3).

– More surprisingly, hair shaft growths were produced in vitro from pluripotent stem cells derived from mouse embryonic cells (2).

The challenge to produce such organoids from human adult hair follicle progenitor cells remains to be take up in the goal to pave the way of regenerative medicine. We developed new methods to amplify human hair follicle matrix cells and to produce neo dermal papilla spheroids. An original combination of both drives to the growth of hair organoids with K85 positive cells.”



I believe the publishing of this poster may change the way people view “the race” to a hair cloning therapy over the next decade. It’s nice to have one of the largest companies in the world involved. We can be mostly sure there is still some work to be done in perfecting L’Oreal’s hair follicle culturing process, however, when it is ready, the idea of producing follicles with Poietis’ bioprinting is highly appealing. Without revealing any specific details at this time, L’Oreal’s Head of Advanced Research told me that the L’Oreal team will continue to put best efforts towards this project and hope to publish their work when ready.

This poster has been previously shared at an American Hair Research Summit, European Hair Research Society Meeting, and the WCHR 2019 meeting. Special thanks to Mickael Le Balch for sharing this work with the readers of Follicle Thought.

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