Cancer fighters know that losing their hair is often part of the battle, but Michigan State University researchers have developed a shampoo-like gel that has been studied in animal models and could protect hair from falling out during chemotherapy treatment.
Baldness from chemotherapy-induced alopecia causes personal, social and professional anxiety for everyone who experiences it. Currently, there are few solutions — 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.
Bryan Smith, an associate professor in the College of Engineering and with MSU’s Institute for Qualitative Health Science and Engineering, has developed a gel the consistency of shampoo that he hopes will help protect patients’ hair throughout treatment. When Smith was a trainee at Stanford University, he learned and used a process that inverted the typical engineering process, seeking to objectively identify and completely characterize critical clinical needs prior to solving them.
“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,” Smith said. “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. Once I understood, it became clear to me that better solutions are very important to many cancer patients’ quality of life.”
This rigorous process of specifying the need, identifying possible solutions, developing an initial prototype, and refining and testing it led to the development of a gel described in a new paper appearing in Biomaterials Advances.
The gel is a hydrogel, which absorbs a lot of water and provides long-lasting delivery of drugs to the patient’s scalp. 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. 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. 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 and/or venture funding to move this research forward into clinical trials and, eventually, to human patients.
“The research has the potential to help many people,” Smith said. “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.”
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