Researchers Have Successfully 3D Printed Hair Follicles

Hair is a tricky subject – always desired on the head where it thins out over the years while fought against and declared superfluous on other parts of the body for aesthetic reasons. In this respect, nature is more intelligent than we may want to admit, because the fine hairs on the skin actually fulfill important tasks. For example, hair follicles produce sweat, help regulate body temperature and contain stem cells that promote skin healing. In addition, some medicines and cosmetics enter the body through the skin, which is why the hair follicles on the skin play a crucial role in dermatological tests.

Reconstructed skin models have been developed for such medical tests for decades, but there are still gaps in terms of their complexity and completeness. To date, no skin model has fully developed hair follicle units. However, the steady emergence of 3D bioprinting technologies could close this gap and create biologically and physiologically representative skin models that more closely resemble natural skin and are better suited for efficacy studies than currently available skin models. This is where a study by researchers at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) comes in.

Until now, skin models from the laboratory have been incomplete and lack hair follicles (photo credits: Chanel)

The scientists, led by Dr. Pankaj Karande, Associate Professor of Chemical and Bioengineering, have succeeded in using 3D printing to incorporate hair follicles into human, lab-grown skin tissue for the first time. This first-of-its-kind example provides a glimpse of how 3D printing could pave the way for future drug testing and skin transplants. “Dr. Karande’s work is a great example of advances being made by RPI researchers at the interface of engineering and life sciences with impact on human health,” said Shekhar Garde, Ph.D., dean of the Rensselaer School of Engineering. “Bringing multichannel 3D printing to the biological realm is opening exciting opportunities that would have been hard to imagine in the past.”