Genes driving alopecia areata

Alopecia areata is an autoimmune disease where a patient's immune cells attack their own hair follicles, causing hair to fall out in clumps. In collaboration with the National Alopecia Areata Foundation (NAAF), Christiano and her group were able to compare genomes between patients and healthy control individuals.^[4]

In 2009, Christiano and her group published the discovery of 139 genetic markers linked to alopecia areata.^[4] Although many expected that genes involved in alopecia would also be involved in other inherited hair and skin diseases, they found that genes linked to alopecia were linked to other types of autoimmune diseases instead: type-1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and celiac disease.^[4]

Strategies for growing human hair

In addition to her efforts in understanding the genetics behind alopecia, Christiano is also researching ways to treat it and other types of hair loss. Most therapies focus on stopping or slowing down hair loss, while hair transplantation simply moves one part of the scalp to another. Christiano's goal is to grow human hair in lab settings that could be then transplanted onto human scalp with minimal scarring. Although mouse and rat hair easily grow in lab, the methods do not work as well when growing human hair.^[6] In 2013, Christiano and her group adapted the hanging drop cell culture technique to grow human cells that successfully grew human hair when transplanted onto the backs of nude mice.^{[7][8][9][10]} In 2015, Christiano and her group found that a class of drugs called JAK inhibitors promoted hair follicles to enter growth phase.^[11][12] In 2019, Christiano and colleagues developed a "hair farm", using a 3D-printed scaffold as a microenvironment to grow human skin cells and produce hair.^[13][14][15]