Let It Grow: Lab-grown skin now can produce its own hair and sweat glands

<span property="schema:name">Let It Grow: Lab-grown skin now can produce its own hair and sweat glands</span>
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Let It Grow: Lab-grown skin now can produce its own hair and sweat glands

    • Author Name
      Mariah Hoskins
    • Author Twitter Handle
      @GCFfan1

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    If you were waiting for lab-grown skin to have the ability to sprout hairs like a Chia Pet, now is the time to celebrate. A group of researchers at the Tokyo University of Science have made a major medical leap in getting lab-grown skin to behave more closely to the way natural skin does.

    Prior to this innovative breakthrough, lab-grown skin provided solely an aesthetic advantage for skin graft patients, but the “skin” lacked quality function or interaction capability with surrounding tissues. This new method for growing skin with the use of stem cells, however, now allows not only hair, but oil-producing sebaceous glands and sweat glands to grow as well.

    Their Findings

    Led by Ryoji Takagi, Japanese researchers worked with immune-suppressed hairless mice as test subjects. By scraping the mice's gums to collect tissue samples, researchers were able to turn those samples into engineered stem cells, called induced pluripotent cells (IPS cells); these cells were then nursed with a set of chemical signals that would make them start producing skin. After a few days of growing in the lab, hair follicles and glands would start to appear.

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