In the past ten years there has been an increasing recognition of the quite unusual regenerative power that cells of the adult skin and hair follicle possess.

In the past, one thought that this sort of power was restricted to the cells in the womb at the embryo/foetal stage.

The basic research that Intercytex and other groups around the world are pursuing focuses on the increased appreciation that adult skin and hair follicles possess significant regenerative capacity.

Research has always shown that skin can repair itself in the adult, though this capacity does decrease with old age. Ulcers, for example, are harder to heal in the elderly, and there has always been an understanding that younger skin has more regenerative capacity than older skin.

What has been surprising in recent work, particularly from animal models, is that adult skin retains significant regenerative/tissue remodelling capacity, perhaps to allow for the formation of new tissue. That may mean, for example in the Intercytex case, the creation of new hair follicles.

The interest of this group and others is to see if they can either strengthen weakened (miniaturised) adult hair follicles or introduce the circumstances for new hair follicles to form, and so new hair growth.

There is increasing acceptance that this view is based on a good scientific rationale.

The process it is using involves injecting adult cells into the skin.

The important point here is that these are taken from adults, and particularly from the same individuals they are attempting to treat. The trial shows that the skin can retain significant regenerative capacity potentially to form new hair follicles. This is something we have only started to believe may be possible in the past five years. Before that, the suggestion that it could be done would have been immediately debunked. The only caveat is whether this approach will produce cosmetically acceptable results. For the consumer that will be the prime consideration.

If you look at a normal scalp, the hair is quite well patterned. It grows out in particular angles, it is spaced in a particular way. There is a certain texture. There are questions over what drives the development of these patterns, and it is not yet clear whether you can determine it fully.

For researchers there will be a lot of learning as they go along, in terms of optimising what nature has had a chance to optimise over millennia.

There is a huge range of hair growth patterns in mammals and also in humans, and also in different parts of the same body.

Only time will tell whether the results will be cosmetically acceptable.

Optimisation will be a very important part of the effort – to try to get the hair to grow in as normal a form as possible.

Desmond Tobin is Professor of Cell Biology at the University of Bradford

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