Stem Cells in Hair Follicles Show Myelin Repair Potential

Research Summary: CD34 defines melanocyte stem cell subpopulations with distinct regenerative properties

Myelin repair or remyelination is considered by many, including an overwhelming majority of our community based on a recent Facebook poll, to be the next major step in helping to treat multiple sclerosis.  For this reason, researchers are exploring many different approaches to make this possible.  You may remember that we have previously featured projects on this topic.  This has included work by Novoron Bioscience (who are developing a compound that can help promote remyelination) and the Tisch MS Research Center of New York (who are looking at the potential of mesenchymal stem cells to aid this process).

In this article, we summarise new research that could open up another new avenue for myelin repair.  As always, if you do have any questions, please feel free to comment below or under the post related to this article on our Facebook page.

The study was conducted at The University of Maryland in Baltimore and was published in PLOS Genetics.  The full article is currently open access and can be found here.

This research investigated a type of stem cell found in hair follicles, known as melanocyte stem cells.

Their results showed that there were different types of these stem cells that had different functions.

Of interest, they found that a specific form of these melanocyte stem cells were able to form myelin around nerve cells.

The ability to generate a functioning myelin sheath was seen both in cell culture and in a small number of mice experiments.  Having seen the same result in both of these types of experiments gives increased confidence in the findings.

This research is at a very early stage.  Although the results look promising (as mentioned above), it will now be necessary to repeat these studies in further animal models using much larger numbers.  Even then, as we have said before, positive results at this stage may not transfer across to successful human trials.

It will be interesting to see how this progresses.  As the saying goes, it is better to have “many irons in the fire” and so any new avenues that may help with myelin repair are worth investigating and discussing.