Green glowing mice may mean gene therapy for hair
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Mice whose fur glows green may
be the first step to using gene therapy to treat hair loss, baldness and perhaps
even to permanently change hair color, researchers say.
They put jellyfish genes into the hair follicles of the
mice, which grew fur that glowed fluorescent green under the right light.
"The hair now is glowing green because green
fluorescent protein is in the hair shaft," Robert Hoffman of San
Diego-based AntiCancer, Inc., whose company led the study, said in a telephone
interview.
"We saw lots of green fluorescent hair."
Writing in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, Hoffman and colleagues said their experiment
involved skin taken from a mouse, treated, and then grafted to another mouse.
They need to try it now directly on live mice.
"It's got a way to go before the market,"
said Hoffman, who worked with scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and Japan's Kitasato University School of Medicine.
But, he added: "We have a good system now to get
genes into hair follicles."
Green fluorescent protein is often used by scientists
testing genetic engineering techniques. It is a single gene that makes jellyfish
glow green in the dark, is harmless to other animals and is easy to look for.
Hoffman said if one new gene functions in the hair
follicle, others should.
His idea is to treat the hair loss that is caused by
cancer chemotherapy. "You can imagine putting in genes that confer
resistance to chemotherapy," he said.
Treating a receding hairline may be a bit more
difficult, Hoffman said. "In male pattern baldness, the follicle makes a
little fine hair instead of a normal hair shaft. This obviously involves a lot
of genes."
Once the genes involved in color and graying are better
understood, it may even be possible to use gene transfer as a cosmetic
procedure, he said.
The system could also be used for more standard gene
therapy, Hoffman said. He believes a hair follicle could be genetically
engineered to make any kind of protein.
"Why can't it make insulin? Why can't it make
interferon (an immune system protein)?" he asked.
"You've seen people with two yards of hair. That
is all protein. That little hair follicle is a tremendous factory."
Scientists have tried to use gene therapy to change
other cells in the body, notably muscle and liver cells, but Hoffman said hair
follicles are easier to get to.
Copyright 2002, Reuters News Service