Revolutionary discovery to prevent hair loss due to chemotherapy

Washington: Hair loss related to chemotherapy is one of the most painful side effects of modern anticancer therapy. While searching for a solution, the researchers discovered a new strategy to protect hair follicles.

The study of Professor Ralf Paus's laboratory at the Dermatology Research Center has described how it is possible to prevent damage to the hair follicle caused by taxanes, which are anticancer drugs that can cause permanent hair loss.

To do this, scientists have exploited the properties of a new class of drugs, CDK4 / 6 inhibitors, that block cell division and are already approved in medicine as "targeted" cancer treatments.

"Although, at first, it seems counter-intuitive, we found that CDK4 / 6 inhibitors can be used temporarily to interrupt cell division without causing additional toxic effects in the hair follicle." Hair follicles were much less sensitive to the harmful effects of taxanes, "said Dr. Talveen Purba, lead author of the study.

According to the study published in the journal "EMBO Molecular Medicine", taxanes are very important anti-cancer drugs commonly used to treat, for example, patients with breast cancer or breast cancer. lung, and causing particular anxiety in patients with breast cancer a long hair loss can be caused by taxanes.

"One of the pillars of our study was first to understand how hair follicles responded to taxane-based chemotherapy, and found that specialized division cells at the base of the hair follicle, which are Therefore, we need to protect as much of these cells as possible from the side effects of chemotherapy – but so that cancer does not benefit, "the report said. Dr. Purba.

The team hopes their work will lead to the development of externally applied drugs that will slow or temporarily halt cell division in the scalp hair follicles of patients undergoing chemotherapy to reduce the damage to hair caused by chemotherapy.

This could complement and enhance the effectiveness of existing precautionary approaches, namely scalp cooling devices.

The researchers point out that further efforts are desperately needed in this critically underfunded area of ​​cancer, where patients have been waiting for so long to see real breakthroughs in the pharmacological prevention of hair loss.

"Despite the fact that taxanes have been used in the clinic for decades and that we have known for a long time that they cause hair loss, we are just scratching the surface of how they are damaging the human hair follicle, "said Dr. Purba.

"We also do not really know why some patients experience greater hair loss than others while they take the same drug and the same dose of medication, and why some chemotherapy treatments and combinations of drugs have far worse results than others, "he added. .

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