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Creating hairy human skin: Not as easy as you think by EurekAlert!

New culture technique opens the door for new treatment for wound and burn treatments, testing drugs and cosmetics; the technique is a proof of concept for developing other human organoid systems, including the inner ear.

For more than 40 years, scientists and commercial companies have been recreating human skin in laboratories around the world. Yet all of these products lack important aspects of normal skin–hair, nerves, and fat.

In new research, cultured human skin cells embedded with fat and nerves and capable of growing hair are a reality. The achievement represents more than five years of study that started in the laboratory of Karl Koehler, PhD (then at Indiana University School of Medicine) and completed in Koehler’s new laboratory at Boston Children’s Hospital in the departments of otolaryngology and communication enhancement and plastic and oral surgery research. The technique appears in a paper published this week in Nature.