CNN —
For cancer patients, treatment-related hair loss can be difficult to deal with.
An estimated 65% of people receiving chemotherapy experience it as a side effect. That’s because the drug attacks rapidly growing cells but cannot selectively spare non-cancerous cells, such as hair follicles. Some types of diseases, such as breast cancer, can cause hair loss in 99.9% of chemotherapy patients.
Hair usually regrows within a few months after treatment ends, but a 2019 study found that 56% of patients considered hair loss to be the worst side effect of chemotherapy, and some even refused treatment altogether. There may be.
One way to limit hair loss is a technique called scalp cooling. In this technique, patients wear a headgear that is connected to a machine that runs a cooling fluid, reducing blood flow to the hair follicles and reducing the amount of drug absorbed into the hair follicles. Their efficiency varies, but in trials, about half of patients who tried them retained more than 50% of their hair.
However, scalp cooling also has its drawbacks. “One is that the machines are large and physically fixed in place, which means patients are treated for hair loss before and after each chemotherapy treatment, which is two to three times less than they would otherwise be. “You’ll spend twice as much time in the hospital,” he said. Aaron Hannon is the CEO and founder of Luminate, an Irish startup working to develop a helmet that aims to improve on current scalp cooling technology.
The helmet, called Lily, is completely portable and allows patients to go home immediately after treatment. They typically need to be worn for 90 minutes immediately after treatment, Hannon said.
Because it uses pressure rather than cooling, there is no need for a pre-cooling period before treatment begins, which results in faster results. It also aims to improve another important element, Hannon said. “The comfort that patients experience during treatment,” he says. “Cold therapy can be very cold and somewhat painful for patients, so we definitely had a lot of feedback from users to come up with a more comfortable alternative to cooling devices.”
Luminate is being tested in Europe with promising results. According to the company, about 75% of patients did not experience hair loss. “For example, a patient who received a very common treatment for breast cancer completed 12 cycles of treatment and kept nearly all of her hair,” Hannon said. “There have been no serious adverse events associated with this device, so the safety profile is pretty good.”
Hannon said hair loss has a significant impact on patients, affecting not only their physical appearance but also their overall health and ability to relate to other people. “It was really the patient experience that inspired us to start this whole business,” he said.
“I’ll never forget talking to a young mother who had breast cancer. She told me that hair removal was important to her not just from an aesthetic point of view, as we might think. She said, “She just wanted her children to feel okay, and she didn’t have to tell them that their mother was sick.” But hair loss was what forced it. ”
Luminate aims to begin clinical trials in the U.S. and Europe next year, with the goal of first commercially launching the technology in the U.S. once it receives approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Commercial launch will begin shortly thereafter, and the device will be made available to patients through health insurance companies. The cost to the insurance company is expected to be approximately $1,700 per helmet. By comparison, a course of scalp cooling treatments typically costs between $1,500 and $3,000.
The helmet works by applying small compressive forces across the surface of the scalp, causing the small capillaries around the hair follicles to collapse. “As a result, the blood pressure inside the capillaries becomes higher than the pressure outside, reducing blood flow to the hair follicle,” Hannon said. This has two implications. One is that the amount of chemotherapy drugs that can reach the hair follicle is reduced, and the other is that there is less blood and therefore less oxygen around it. This means that the chemotherapeutic agents that still pass through are less responsive and less effective.
Luminate, which has a team of 35 people, started in 2018 as a research project at the University of Galway in Ireland, where Hannon works with co-founder Barbara Oliveira and director of the university’s Translational Medical Devices Institute. I work with Martin O’Halloran. . It was spun off in 2021 and recently raised $15 million in Series A funding.
Fear of hair loss can influence treatment decisions, says Andrea Smith, a nurse leader at Memorial Sloan Kettering Breast Imaging Center, a cancer treatment center in New York City.
“In the past, patients may have had a hard time agreeing to certain treatments if they knew they would lose their hair,” she says. “They know that hair loss is a real possibility and may make less optimal choices or delay care.”
Although Smith is not involved with Luminate, he has been working on scalp cooling for patients for about eight years, now using an FDA-approved technology that uses a cap connected to a floor unit. Pre-cooling required. That is, the patient must put on the cap before starting the treatment, and then remain seated during the post-cooling phase. The cooling period varies depending on the type of treatment.
Portable devices are a welcome improvement, she says. “I think patients want that,” she said, adding that this frees up space in the center that was occupied by post-cooling patients.
She notes that while scalp cooling can be uncomfortable for some users, using pressure does not necessarily mean that side effects such as headaches are completely eliminated, and that the pressure actually used states that the effects on patients may vary depending on the level of According to Luminate, this pressure is comparable to a fraction of the peak you feel in your arm during a blood pressure test, or one-eighth to one-sixth.
Avoiding hair loss in any way is an “innovation” in cancer treatment, Smith added. “Patients feel that people know that they have been diagnosed with cancer because they have no hair and are bound to undergo chemotherapy,” she says. Cooling the scalp “gives us the option to receive appropriate treatment for the disease, with the potential to save some, if not a significant portion, of our hair.”
Early results from new pressure-based helmets are showing similar benefits, Hannon said.
“For the patients we successfully treated, the benefits were tremendous,” he says. “For some people, this has changed their entire experience of chemotherapy treatment. That’s really heartwarming.”
