The chemotherapy Christine Ko was prescribed for her breast cancer is pretty much a guarantee for losing your hair. The intervention her doctors offered to prevent the hair loss was a cold cap that, cooled to 32 degrees Fahrenheit, would turn her scalp into an icy crown. But, to her, it wasn’t much of an option.
“It would cost about $2,000, and it’s about 50% effective. I’m not, not vain, but I was like I’m not paying $2,000 for a 50% chance,” Ko said. But as a dermatologist at Yale Cancer Center, Ko knew there simply weren’t any other options. “From dermatology and personal experience, there’s not many good treatments. You know, we actually don’t really know how to stimulate hair growth,” she said.
That’s a problem that Perseus Therapeutics, a biotech founded last year, hopes to fix. The company is currently developing an antibody that might reliably protect the head’s hair follicles from chemotherapy damage — if it works. There are a few reasons why it may not be practical, including the fact that it has not yet been tested in human patients. Once developed, the antibody will also still need to make it through clinical trials.
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