REPORT: Researchers Grow Fully Functional Skin (With Hair!)

Skin can do a lot of things, but one thing it can do especially well is simply grow. Every month our body fully replaces its skin, and there are close to 19 million skin cells an inch! But in the lab, this has been difficult to repeat. However, recently, some Japanese scientists grew functional skin tissue, and they were able to transplant it onto living organisms.

This technique has only been tested on mice. However, in the future, it could change things for victims of burns or for people who have undergone skin damage of a catastrophic nature. And also, less severely perhaps, this skin growth could be used to treat male pattern baldness, which many men experience as they get older.

The researchers in Japan who worked with mice to create skin were able to implant it into the gums of mice to build clusters, some of which looked like a growing embryo. They chose mice that had a fully functioning immune system, just to make sure that they would accept the transplant. This is a huge step forward.

As skin is one of the largest--and most important--organs in the body, it's also difficult to treat it well when it's been damaged. So far, they've come up with skin grafts (which can be painful) and artificial skin (which is far from ideal). The skin grown in the lab shows that this new skin can be made with hair follicles and sweat glands, enabling it to stay moisturized and control temperatures.

Now, this can help with skin repair, but it can also help with baldness. After the mice received the skin implants, they began growing hair, which shows that the skin implanted is capable of doing the same for a person, too. It's perfectly possible that this type of skin implant could be used to aid men who have male-pattern baldness, and this is not too far off in the future.

While the technique is still about 5 or 10 years off, relatively speaking, that's not too far away. But since 95 percent of men and 50 percent of women suffer from baldness at some point, this is something that is likely to be popular when it is made public.