I have covered Dr. Junji Fukuda and his important hair related work at Yokohama National University in Japan several times on this blog in the past. Most recently, this was just two weeks ago in relation to his latest paper titled “Spontaneous hair follicle germ (HFG) formation in vitro, enabling the large-scale production of HFGs for regenerative medicine“, which was published towards the end of 2017, but seems to now be dated as 2018.
At the time, I decided that this development was only worth a cursory mention in my once a month “brief items of interest” post. My decision was clouded by the fact that this research only entailed work on mice (see bottom part of image on left, courtesy Yokohama National University). We are all a bit bored/tired/frustrated with that of course.
However, earlier today, Dr. Fukuda and his team’s work was covered in the Science Daily publication. Key quote from Dr. Fukuda:
“This simple method is very robust and promising. We hope that this technique will improve human hair regenerative therapy to treat hair loss such as androgenic alopecia,” adds Fukuda. “In fact, we have preliminary data that suggests human HFG formation using human keratinocytes and dermal papilla cells.”
Perhaps this really might end up being a major development, even in humans.
Tsuji, Shiseido, Ohyama and perhaps now Fukuda? I have never been to Japan, but it looks like this may change in the future.