Isolation, Culture Of Human Fetal Hair Follicle Bulge Cells And Its Differentiation In Vitro

[Background]One of main purpose in treating burns is to close the burnswounds as early as possible. Skin autografting has been widely used and rescued numerous severe burns victims, but many cruxes remain to be solved, such as limited donor skin, secondary contracture of thin split-thickness graft, lack of skin appendages, etc. The developments of tissue engineering provide a new method to repair the burns wound. Many commercial tissue engineering skin have been used clinically and showed relative good results. However, all of them have disparities with ideal tissue engineering skin, such as lack of hair follicle and sebaceous gland, immune rejection, costliness, etc. Adult stem cells, which have high proliferation and multipotent differentiations, seem to solve these problems. Tissue engineering is restricted by three key elements: seeding cells, scaffold and extracelluar matrix. Among them, the seeding cells are most important. They should have high proliferative capacity, stable biological properties, low antigenicities and satisfactory tissue repair abilities.Evidence in rodents demonstrated that hair bulge is the repository of multipotent stem cells which have slowly cycling and quiescent nature, regenerative potential, roles in wound healing and the ability to produce a functional dermis. Transplantation studies, indirect labeling methods and genetic evidence suggested that bulge cells possess the ability to differentiate into multiple cell types within the cutaneous epithelium. As their characteristics accord with those of the seeding...