Japanese researchers grow skin tissue complete with hair follicles and glands in lab

In a promising development, Japanese researchers have grown skin tissue that not only includes hair follicles but all the glands that come with it -- including oil and sweat glands.

Japanese researchers took cells from mouse gums, turned them into stem cell-like forms that generated skin, and implanted these into mice with immune system deficiencies (that allowed new skin to grow unimpeded).

The resulting skin was a little creepy but it was healthy, behaved normally and made connections with natural tissue.

Though the technique was still a long way from practical application, according to the scientist, human trials would only get underway sometime within the next 10 years.

If it were to come to fruition, though, the discovery could be a tremendous boon to the medical world. In case one became a victim of a serious burn or disease that destroyed skin, one could get replacement tissue that was virtually indistinguishable from the naturally grown variety.

According to the study published on 1 April in the journal Science Advances this could help patients in need of new skin, including burn patients. This solved the problem of current bio-engineered organs that did not function like natural organs.

In this case, skin tissue that did not have oil and sweat glands would allow it to function like a normal tissue.

''Up until now, artificial skin development has been hampered by the fact that the skin lacked the important organs, such as hair follicles and exocrine glands,  which allow the skin to play its important role in regulation,'' says lead researcher Takashi Tsuji of the RIKEN Centre for Developmental Biology, australianetworknews.com reported. ''With this new technique, we have successfully grown skin that replicates the function of normal tissue.''

''We are coming ever closer to the dream of being able to recreate actual organs in the lab for transplantation, and also believe that tissue grown through this method could be used as an alternative to animal testing of chemicals,'' Takashi Tsuji says.