Abstract
The hair follicle is a skin integument at the boundary between an organism and its immediate environment. The biological role of the human hair follicle has lost some of its ancestral importance. However, an indepth investigation of this miniorgan reveals hidden complexity with huge research potential. An essential consideration when dealing with human research is the awareness of potential harm and thus the absolute need not to harm—a rule aptly qualified by the Latin term “primum non nocere” (first do no harm). The plucked hair shaft offers such advantages. The use of stem cells found in hair follicles cells is gaining momentum in the field of regenerative medicine. Furthermore, current diagnostic and clinical applications of plucked hair follicles include their use as autologous and/or three-dimensional epidermal equivalents, together with their utilization as surrogate tissue in pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamics studies. Consequently, the use of noninvasive diagnostic procedures on hair follicle shafts, posing as a surrogate molecular model for internal organs in the individual patient for a spectrum of human disease conditions, can possibly become a reality in the near future.
Highlights
The hair follicle is a skin integument at the boundary between an organism and its immediate environment. It is the evolutionary relative of the scale, feather, and nail, integuments that have served an essential role in the survival of organisms [1]
The biological role of the human hair follicle has lost some of its ancestral importance; an indepth investigation of this miniorgan reveals hidden complexity with huge research potential
They achieved this by using contact sensitizers in cultured keratinocytes derived from the bulge of plucked haired follicles known as bulge-derived keratinocytes (BDKs) [18]
Summary
The hair follicle is a skin integument at the boundary between an organism and its immediate environment. The authors Paus and Foitzik describe the hair follicle as having a unique mammalian characteristic with a stem cell-rich, prototypic neuroectodermal-mesodermal interaction system. It is described as a mammalian organ undergoing cyclic transformations from stages of rapid growth (anagen) to apoptosis-driven regression (catagen) and back to anagen, via an interspersed period of relative quiescence (telogen) that persists throughout the animal’s lifetime [2]. Hair shafts represent human tissue that can be sampled over different time points This miniorgan has both neuroectodermal and mesodermal origins as well as acting as a source of stem cells. This paper will mainly focus on the use of the plucked hair shaft for human medical research and its emerging potential
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