Drug Battles Hair Loss in Cancer Chemotherapy

A potential new way to prevent hair loss resulting from cancer chemotherapy has been discovered by researchers at the University of Miami School of Medicine and Cell Technology Inc., of Boulder, Colo. They have been working with a bacterial preparation, called ImuVert, that stimulates the immune system to react more effectively against cancer cells.

Hair loss is one of the more demoralizing side-effects of chemotherapy, and some patients have refused treatment because of it.

When they administered ImuVert to leukemic rats in combination with the widely used anticancer drugs cytosine arabinoside and doxorubicin, the researchers reported last week in Science, they found that the animals did not lose hair, as they did when they received only the cancer drugs. But the preparation was not effective in combination with another drug, cyclophosphamide, suggesting that a different mechanism is involved.

ImuVert has already passed safety trials in humans and is now being studied as therapy for brain tumors. The researchers said they thus should be able to begin testing its effects on hair preservation in humans very quickly.