In a paper published in the journal Cardiovascular Research, researchers demonstrate that stem cells isolated from sheep hair follicles contain the smooth muscle cells that could grow into new blood vessels and stem cells from human hair follicles into contractile smooth muscle cells.

"We have demonstrated that engineered blood vessels prepared with smooth muscle progenitor cells from hair follicles are capable of dilating and constricting, critical properties that make them ideal for engineering cardiovascular tissue regeneration," said Andreadis.

In addition to growing new skin for burn victims, cells from hair follicles could potentially be used to engineer vascular grafts and possibly regenerate cardiac tissues for patients with heart problems.

Read more from this report.

Photo: Research by Stelios Andreadis has produced this smooth muscle progenitor cell derived from a hair follicle, which expresses calponin (in red), a marker for smooth muscle cells. The cell nucleus is shown in blue.