Baldness Breakthrough: Fat Cells Could Be The Secret to Rapid Hair Regrowth

Recommendable! Is this finally the breakthrough many men and some women have been waiting for for many decades if not centuries and longer! There appear to be some serious caveats with this study.

"There's promising new research to report in efforts to reverse baldness: A new study shows how restorative hair growth can be triggered in mice within 20 days, by stimulating fat cells around hair follicles in the skin.

Led by researchers from the National Taiwan University, the study builds on established knowledge of how skin irritation and injury often trigger hair growth. ...

There's a key caveat: The treatment is only effective on hair follicles that are in a resting stage – waiting for the signal to grow again. On the human scalp, baldness typically shifts the lengths of these stages hair by hair – it's more complex than shaving the hair off, as was done with the mice. ..."

From the highlights and abstract:

"Highlights

• Skin injury triggers rapid adipocyte lipolysis through skin inflammation

• Macrophage-adipocyte interaction stimulates adipocyte lipolysis through SAA3

• MUFAs stimulate quiescent eHFSCs via Pgc1-α, which boosts mitochondrial functions

• Topical treatment of MUFAs promotes hair growth by activating eHFSCs

Summary

Adipocytes as vital energy reservoirs respond to systemic metabolic demands by storing or releasing lipids. Whether they can promote tissue regeneration through local metabolic communication remains unclear.

We found that after skin injury, macrophages quickly infiltrate dermal adipose tissue, where they promote free fatty acid release from adipocytes via serum amyloid A3-dependent lipolysis, which, in turn, promotes hair regrowth. Epithelial hair follicle stem cells (eHFSCs) absorb the released monounsaturated fatty acids via fatty acid translocase CD36 and activate the transcriptional coactivator Pgc1-α. Downstream of Pgc1-α, increased fatty acid oxidation and mitochondrial biogenesis enhance energy production, enabling eHFSCs to exit quiescence.

Topical treatment of monounsaturated fatty acids suffices to promote hair growth by activating eHFSCs.

Our findings demonstrate a macrophage-to-adipocyte-to-hair follicle axis that promotes tissue-level regeneration via short-range metabolic signaling through free fatty acids.

Analogous regeneration-facilitating mechanisms elicited by injury-induced panniculitis may operate in other adipose-rich organs."

Baldness Breakthrough: Fat Cells Could Be The Secret to Rapid Hair Regrowth : ScienceAlert

Adipocyte lipolysis activates epithelial stem cells for hair regeneration through fatty acid metabolic signaling

Credits: The Flyover

Graphical abstract

3D-printed hydrogel structure using peptide inks could be gamechanger for regenerative medicine

Good news!

"... scientists have developed a revolutionary solution for constructing complex structures for housing cells using a soft, Jell-O-like material. By using a self-assembling peptide ink, researchers ... have figured out how to 3D-print well-defined structures, which could be used to grow muscles and — perhaps one day — entire organs fit for transplant. ...
These core peptides used as ink are designed to be hydrophobic (rejecting water) on one side and hydrophilic (attracting water) on the other, which allows them to stack onto one another like a ‘hydrophobic sandwich’ and form long fibers, which then form a hydrogel — a water-based material with a gelatinous texture that can be useful for a wide range of applications, ranging from tissue engineering and soft robotics to wastewater treatment. ..."

From the abstract:

"3D printing has become one of the primary fabrication strategies used in biomedical research. Recent efforts have focused on the 3D printing of hydrogels to create structures that better replicate the mechanical properties of biological tissues. These pose a unique challenge, as soft materials are difficult to pattern in three dimensions with high fidelity. Currently, a small number of biologically derived polymers that form hydrogels are frequently reused for 3D printing applications. Thus, there exists a need for novel hydrogels with desirable biological properties that can be used as 3D printable inks. In this work, the printability of multidomain peptides (MDPs), a class of self-assembling peptides that form a nanofibrous hydrogel at low concentrations, is established. MDPs with different charge functionalities are optimized as distinct inks and are used to create complex 3D structures, including multi-MDP prints. Additionally, printed MDP constructs are used to demonstrate charge-dependent differences in cellular behavior in vitro. This work presents the first time that self-assembling peptides have been used to print layered structures with overhangs and internal porosity. Overall, MDPs are a promising new class of 3D printable inks that are uniquely peptide-based and rely solely on supramolecular mechanisms for assembly."

3D-printed Jell-O-like structure using peptide inks could be gamechanger for regenerative medicine

3D Printing of Self-Assembling Nanofibrous Multidomain Peptide Hydrogels (no public access)

Spiny Mice Appear to Regenerate Damaged Kidneys

Amazing stuff! Good news!

"... After damaging their kidneys to simulate kidney disease, the scientists found that the spiny mice not only regenerated the structure and function of nephrons, the tiny filters that make up the kidney, but they did so without the dangerous scarring that normally occurs in mammals. ...
“We used the term ‘functional regeneration’ because spiny mice sustain severe kidney injury initially but then completely restore kidney function within two weeks. This differs from many kinds of ‘repair’ responses, including fibrotic repair, that restore tissue continuity but do so with variable degrees of loss of organ function,” ..."

From the abstract:

"Fibrosis-driven solid organ failure is an enormous burden on global health. Spiny mice (Acomys) are terrestrial mammals that can regenerate severe skin wounds without scars to avoid predation.  ... Here, we show that despite equivalent acute obstructive or ischemic kidney injury, spiny mice fully regenerate nephron structure and organ function without fibrosis, whereas C57Bl/6 or CD1 mice progress to complete organ failure with extensive renal fibrosis. Two mechanisms for vertebrate regeneration have been proposed that emphasize either extrinsic (pro-regenerative macrophages) or intrinsic (surviving cells of the organ itself) controls. Comparative transcriptome analysis revealed that the Acomys genome appears poised at the time of injury to initiate regeneration by surviving kidney cells, whereas macrophage accumulation was not detected until about day 7. Thus, we provide evidence for rapid activation of a gene expression signature for regenerative wound healing in the spiny mouse kidney."

Spiny Mice Appear to Regenerate Damaged Kidneys | The Scientist Magazine® The mice, already known to regenerate skin, seem to avoid the tissue scarring that leads to organ failure in other animals.

Spiny mice activate unique transcriptional programs after severe kidney injury regenerating organ function without fibrosis (open access)

New study shows how to boost muscle regeneration and rebuild tissue

Good news! This is very early stage research, but promising. Aging without much muscle loss will become attainable in the near future!

"... To counter this loss, scientists at the Salk Institute are studying ways to accelerate the regeneration of muscle tissue, using a combination of molecular compounds that are commonly used in stem-cell research.

In a study published on May 25, 2021, in Nature Communications, the investigators showed that using these compounds increased the regeneration of muscle cells in mice by activating the precursors of muscle cells, called myogenic progenitors. ...
The compounds used in the study are often called Yamanaka factors after the Japanese scientist who discovered them. Yamanaka factors are a combination of proteins (called transcription factors) that control how DNA is copied for translation into other proteins. In lab research, they are used to convert specialized cells, like skin cells, into more stem-cell-like cells that are pluripotent, which means they have the ability to become many different types of cells. ...

Muscle regeneration is mediated by muscle stem cells, also called satellite cells. Satellite cells are located in a niche between a layer of connective tissue (basal lamina) and muscle fibers (myofibers). In this study, the team used two different mouse models to pinpoint the muscle stem-cell-specific or niche-specific changes following addition of Yamanaka factors. They focused on younger mice to study the effects of the factors independent of age.

In the myofiber-specific model, they found that adding the Yamanaka factors accelerated muscle regeneration in mice by reducing the levels of a protein called Wnt4 in the niche, which in turn activated the satellite cells. ..."

New study shows how to boost muscle regeneration and rebuild tissue - Salk Institute for Biological Studies Salk research reveals clues about molecular changes underlying muscle loss tied to aging

Here is the link to the underlying research article:

In vivo partial reprogramming of myofibers promotes muscle regeneration by remodeling the stem cell niche (open access)