Establishment and characterization of an immortalized human dermal papilla cell line.

Establishment of immortalized human dermal papilla cells (DPCs) retaining the characteristics of DPCs would be a great help for hair researchers. We recently established a simian virus 40T (SV40T)-transformed human DP cell line (SV40TDPC). However, the cell line senesced around passage 25 and ceased proliferation. In this study, we introduced the human telomerase reverse transcriptase (hTERT) gene into SV40T-DPC and established an immortalized human DP cell line. The cell line, SV40T-hTERT-DPC, did not induce tumors when inoculated into nude mice. SV40T-hTERT-DPC maintained morphology of early passage DPCs, expressed markers of DPCs, and retained responses to Wnt/β-catenin and bone morphogenic protein (BMP) signaling pathways known to be required for hair-inducing activity of DPCs. The data strongly suggest that SV40T-hTERT-DPC retains many characteristics of human DPCs in vivo without malignant transformation.