Breakthrough may prevent hair loss in cancer treatment

Cancer is a horribly common disease that nearly all of us will be affected by in some way during our lifetime. While treatment for cancer continues to improve year by year, it can still leave many unpleasant side effects. Chemotherapy, one of the most common cancer treatments to date, can cause sickness, a loss of appetite, and hair loss. However, as reported by Health Europa, a new breakthrough may now mean that hair loss can be prevented in cancer patients receiving chemotherapy.

Why does chemotherapy cause hair loss?

Chemotherapy works by targeting all rapidly dividing cells in the body, with an aim to hinder and kill the cancer cells and prevent them from spreading further. The issue is that chemotherapy is not selective – it doesn’t know the difference between a “good” rapidly dividing cell and a “bad” one.

Hair follicles, which are found in the skin and contain lots of very small blood vessels that produce hair, are some of the fastest dividing cells in the body. For this reason, they are targeted along with the cancer cells by chemotherapy, and killed, leading to hair loss. The level of hair loss depends on the type of chemotherapy used, the specific dosage, and the pattern of treatment.

How might a new scientific discovery prevent hair loss with chemotherapy?

Scientists from the University of Manchester published their study in the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine, in which Professor Ralf Paus from the Centre for Dermatology Research discusses how it may be possible to prevent damage in the hair follicle caused by taxanes, cancer drugs which can cause permanent hair loss, in the near future.

Scientists have spent time undergoing significant research into the properties of a newer area of drugs called CDK4/6 inhibitors, which prevent unnecessary divisions of cells, and are already used in certain cancer therapies with a more targeted approach.

As reported in Health Europa, Dr Talveen Purba, the lead author on the study, said: “Although at first this seems counter-intuitive, we found that CDK4/6 inhibitors can be used temporarily to halt cell division without promoting additional toxic effects in the hair follicle.

“When we bathed organ-cultured human scalp hair follicles in CDK4/6 inhibitors, the hair follicles were much less susceptible to the damaging effects of taxanes.

“A pivotal part of our study was to first get to grips with how exactly hair follicles responded to taxane chemotherapy, and we found that the specialised dividing cells at the base of the hair follicle that are critical for producing hair itself, and the stem cells from which they arise, are most vulnerable to taxanes. Therefore, we must protect these cells most from undesired chemotherapy effects – but so that the cancer does not profit from it.”

What does this mean for the future of cancer treatment?

The hope is that that this research into the CDK4/6 inhibitors will assist with the development of treatments that can be applied externally and will have the power to hold up, or temporarily put a stop to, the rapid cell division in the scalp hair follicles of patients undergoing chemotherapy, to prevent chemotherapy-induced hair loss. In the long run, this could could work alongside and enhance the preventative approaches that already exist.

It’s an interesting way of going about it – focusing on the hair follicles and preventing them from rapidly dividing in order for them to not be targeted by chemotherapy, rather than going about it from a chemotherapy angle. However, there is real promise in the study, and it will be interesting to see what this leads to in the future. It’s undeniable that hair loss is one of the most psychologically impactful side effects of chemotherapy, and if there’s a way of preventing it altogether, we can go some way to lessening the impact of chemotherapy on the whole.

According to Dr Purba, there’s still plenty of research to be done, but the future looks positive. He said: “Despite the fact that taxanes have been used in the clinic for decades, and have long been known to cause hair loss, we’re only now scratching the surface of how they damage the human hair follicle.”

“We need time to further develop approaches like this to not only prevent hair loss, but promote hair follicle regeneration in patients who have already undergone hair loss due to chemotherapy.”