The late actor Telly Savalas said it best: Were all born bald, baby.

And bald CAN be beautiful.

But for many follicly-challenged folks, news out of UC San Francisco this week offers some hope of finally having a bad hair day.

In experiments in mice, researchers there have discovered that regulatory T cells (Tregs; pronounced tee-regs), a type of immune cell associated with controlling inflammation, directly trigger stem cells in the skin to promote healthy hair growth.

Without these immune cells as partners, the researchers found, the stem cells cannot regenerate hair follicles, leading to baldness.

Our hair follicles are constantly recycling: when a hair falls out, the whole hair follicle has to grow back, said Dr. Michael Rosenblum, an assistant professor of dermatology at UCSF and senior author on the new paper.

This has been thought to be an entirely stem cell-dependent process, but it turns out Tregs are essential. If you knock out this one immune cell type, hair just doesnt grow.

In other words: no Tregs, no tresses.

The new study appeared online Friday in Cell, a journal that publishes peer-reviewed articles reporting findings of unusual significance in any area of experimental biology.

For 35 million U.S. men and 21 million women who are experiencing hair loss, according to Statistic Brain Research Institute,the UCSF report would probably qualify as significant.

The study suggests that defects in Tregs could be responsible for alopecia areata, a common autoimmune disorder that causes hair loss, and could potentially play a role in other forms of baldness, including male pattern baldness, Rosenblum said.

And since the same stem cells are responsible for helping heal the skin after injury, the researchers note, the study raises the possibility that Tregs may play a key role in wound repair as well.

Normally, the researchers say, Tregs act as peacekeepers and diplomats, informing the rest of the immune system of the difference between friend and foe. When Tregs dont function properly, people may develop allergies to harmless substances like peanut protein or cat dander, or suffer from autoimmune disorders in which the immune system turns on the bodys own tissues.

Like other immune cells, most Tregs reside in the bodys lymph nodes, but some live permanently in other tissues, where researcher say they seem to have evolved to assist with local metabolic functions as well as playing their normal anti-inflammatory role. In the skin, for example, Rosenblum and colleagues have previously shown that Tregs help establish immune tolerance to healthy skin microbes in newborn mice, and these cells also secrete molecules that help heal wounds into adulthood.

Rosenblum wanted to better understand the role of these resident immune cells in skin health. To do this, he and his team developed a technique for temporarily removing Tregs from the skin. But when they shaved patches of hair from these mice to make observations of the affected skin, they made a surprising discovery.

We quickly noticed that the shaved patches of hair never grew back, and we thought, Hmm, now thats interesting, Rosenblum said. We realized we had to delve into this further.

The researchers including UCSF postdoctoral fellow and first author Niwa Ali believe a betterunderstanding of Tregs critical role in hair growth could lead to improved treatments for hair loss more generally and have implications for alopecia areata, an autoimmune disease that causes patients to lose hair in patches from their scalp, eyebrows, and faces.

For many other baldly confident folks, however, Fridays findings may just warrant a shrug.As they say, No hair, dont care.

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Baldness treatment discovered at UCSF - The Mercury News