A few more details on hair stem cells

A few more details on hair stem cells

An article appearing in Pharmaceutical Business Review on-line gives a few more details on the rat hair study than I previously reported. The cells were injected into the skin of newborn mice, which was then grafted onto nude mice (mice which are genetically born without hair and are unable to mount most immune system responses). The stem cells formed 8 different kinds of other cells, including those of the outer root sheath, inner root sheath, the hair shaft, the sebaceous gland and the epidermis. 125 days later, a biopsy was taken from the graft and the process of cloning and culturing was repeated with the stem cells from that sample. Those cells also formed the various portions of hair cells.

Since the mice did not have an immune system response to the skin graft from the baby normal mice or to the presence of cells from another species, the issues of what sort of immune response a human body would mount remain unanswered.