Your Hair Follicles may Hold the Key to Younger looking Skin

All over the world, millions of dollars are spent every year on cosmetic products, dermal fillers, and even surgery to maintain the skin's vitality.

With all of these options available, consumers still find themselves having to choose between cost-effective, non-invasive, or long-lasting. Looking younger has become a worldwide daily obsession with a hefty price tag.

If we delve even just a little into some basic science behind wrinkly skin, we can easily understand why with aging comes lines and wrinkles. The most abundant protein in our bodies, collagen, especially type 1 collagen, is found in muscles, bones, skin, blood vessels, digestive systems and tendons. It's what helps keep our skin strong, firm, and flexible and even replaces dead skin cells.

When it comes to our joints and tendons, in simplest terms, it's the binding agent that helps hold the body together.

Sadly, as we age, collagen production slows and causes sagging or aging skin. Obviously, this does not bode well for keeping skin looking youthful.

On the market today, there are several "miracle" collagen creams that boast the ability to replace or boost our collagen production, but to date none have proven to be the fountain of youth promised.

In turn, we try paralyzing or freezing tissue in our face to soften lines and wrinkles. This works for up to six months and involves injecting varying degrees of chemicals into our bodies, believed to be inert, but still not providing lasting or long-term effects.

Lastly , and the most invasive of measures — there is surgery, which as we know can have lasting effects but with painful healing times, and even, in worst case scenarios, terrible irreversible results.

On the flip side, what if you could actually increase your body's own collagen production, triggering your body to boost production and fill lines and wrinkles for a much younger appearance? Sounds too good to be true, right?

Not so. Fibroblasts are the most common cell in the body constantly creating collagen. Scientists have discovered that a certain fibroblast cell population in the hair follicle, even as we age, continues to produce an abundance of collagen.

Found at the back of the head, these hair follicle cells promise to do what no other product or procedure have been able to achieve thus far, increase collagen production and maintain the look of healthy skin.

Recent clinical studies suggest that the injection of these cells into aging or sun-damaged skin can significantly increase collagen, reversing the impact of skin aging. At RepliCel Life Sciences, we are currently working with these cells for two different products. Specifically, skin rejuvenation and tendon repair.

Our skin product, RCS-01, has just finished a Phase 1 clinical trial investigating the injection of patients with a product made from their own cells to trigger collagen increases. The results of this clinical trial have proven our cell-therapy to be very safe, but also has the potential to reverse effects of aging skin, representing a natural alternative to existing anti-aging treatments.

In our efforts to develop products which regrow hair, repair tendons, and rejuvenate aging skin, we are part of a rapidly-growing sector based on similar science of harnessing a patient's own cells to create products which work to heal and cure, not only daily ailments, but life-threatening illnesses.

Support and funding for cell-therapies that have immediate impact are fundamental to improving our current medical options from things as deadly as cancer and as troubling as diabetes. There is nothing more natural or intuitively appealing than using one's own cells to tailor-make medicines more powerful than drugs.

Lee Buckler, president and CEO of RepliCel Life Sciences, has nearly 20 years of cell therapy experience and has pioneered a number of innovative business and cell-science approaches in the field of regenerative medicine. As CEO of RepliCel, Buckler oversees the development of the world's first-of-its-kind cell therapies treating conditions that affect more than one in three Americans, such as pattern baldness, chronic tendon degeneration, and aging and sun-damaged skin.