Shampoo-like gel may help chemo patients keep hair

By Stephen Beech

A shampoo-like gel could help chemotherapy patients keep their hair, say scientists.

The new product has already been successfully tested on animals.

Cancer patients know that losing their hair is often part of the treatment process.

Doctors say baldness as a result of chemotherapy-induced alopecia causes personal, social and professional anxiety for everyone who experiences it.

But there are currently few solution, and the only ones that are approved are cold caps worn on the patient’s head, which are expensive and have their own extensive side effects.

Now scientists in the United States have developed a gel they say could protect hair from falling out during chemotherapy treatment.

Professor Bryan Smith, of Michigan State University, developed the gel with the consistency of shampoo that he hopes will help protect patients’ hair throughout chemo treatment.

He explained that he used a process that inverted the typical engineering process, seeking to objectively identify and completely characterize critical clinical needs before solving them.

Smith said: “This unmet need of chemotherapy-induced alopecia appealed to me because it is adjacent to the typical needs in medicine such as better treatments and earlier, more accurate diagnostics for cancer.

“This is a need on the personal side of cancer care that, as an engineer, I didn’t fully recognize until I began interviewing cancer physicians and former cancer patients about it.

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"Once I understood, it became clear to me that better solutions are very important to many cancer patients’ quality of life.”

The product is a "hydrogel" which absorbs a lot of water and provides long-lasting delivery of drugs to the patient’s scalp, according to a paper published in the journal Biomaterials Advances.

Smith said: "The hydrogel is designed to be applied to the patient’s scalp before the start of chemotherapy and left on their head as long as the chemotherapy drugs are in their system - or until they are ready to easily wash it off.

"During chemotherapy treatment, chemotherapeutic drugs circulate throughout the body.

"When these drugs reach the blood vessels surrounding the hair follicles on the scalp, they kill or damage the follicles, which releases the hair from the shaft and causes it to fall out."

He says the gel, containing the drugs lidocaine and adrenalone, prevents most of the chemotherapy drugs from reaching the hair follicle by restricting the blood flow to the scalp.

Smith said: "Dramatic reduction in drugs reaching the follicle will help protect the hair and prevent it from falling out.

"To support practical use of this “shampoo,” the gel is designed to be temperature responsive.

"For example, at body temperatures the gel is thicker and clings to the patient’s hair and scalp surface.

"When the gel is exposed to slightly cooler temperatures, the gel becomes thinner and more like a liquid that can be easily washed away."

Smith and his team hope to obtain federal or venture funding to move the research forward into clinical trials and, eventually, to human patients.

He added: “The research has the potential to help many people.

“All the individual components are well-established, safe materials, but we can’t move forward with follow-up studies and clinical trials on humans without the support of substantial funding.”