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Cancer fighters know that losing their hair is often part of the battle, but Michigan State University researchers have developed a shampoo-like gel that has been tested in animal models and could protect hair from falling out during chemotherapy treatment.

Baldness from chemotherapy-induced alopecia causes personal, social and professional anxiety for everyone who experiences it. Currently, there are few solutions — the only ones that are approved are cold caps worn on the patient’s head, which are expensive and have their own extensive side effects.

Bryan Smith, an associate professor in the College of Engineering and with MSU’s Institute for Qualitative Health Science and Engineering, has developed a gel the consistency of shampoo that he hopes will help protect patients’ hair throughout treatment. When Smith was a trainee at Stanford University, he learned and used a process that inverted the typical engineering process, seeking to objectively identify and completely characterize critical clinical needs prior to solving them.

“This unmet need of chemotherapy-induced alopecia appealed to me because it is adjacent to the typical needs in medicine such as better treatments and earlier, more accurate diagnostics for cancer,” Smith said. “This is a need on the personal side of cancer care that, as an engineer, I didn’t fully recognize until I began interviewing cancer physicians and former cancer patients about it. Once I understood, it became clear to me that better solutions are very important to many cancer patients’ quality of life.”

This rigorous process of specifying the need, identifying possible solutions, developing an initial prototype, and refining and testing it led to the development of a gel described in a new paper appearing in Biomaterials Advances.

The gel is a hydrogel, which absorbs a lot of water and provides long-lasting delivery of drugs to the patient’s scalp. The hydrogel is designed to be applied to the patient’s scalp before the start of chemotherapy and left on their head as long as the chemotherapy drugs are in their system — or until they are ready to easily wash it off.

During chemotherapy treatment, chemotherapeutic drugs circulate throughout the body. When these drugs reach the blood vessels surrounding the hair follicles on the scalp, they kill or damage the follicles, which releases the hair from the shaft and causes it to fall out. The gel, containing the drugs lidocaine and adrenalone, prevents most of the chemotherapy drugs from reaching the hair follicle by restricting the blood flow to the scalp. Dramatic reduction in drugs reaching the follicle will help protect the hair and prevent it from falling out.

To support practical use of this “shampoo,” the gel is designed to be temperature responsive. For example, at body temperatures the gel is thicker and clings to the patient’s hair and scalp surface. When the gel is exposed to slightly cooler temperatures, the gel becomes thinner and more like a liquid that can be easily washed away.

Smith and his team hope to obtain federal and/or venture funding to move this research forward into clinical trials and, eventually, to human patients.

“The research has the potential to help many people,” Smith said. “All the individual components are well-established, safe materials, but we can’t move forward with follow-up studies and clinical trials on humans without the support of substantial funding.”

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Three new studies show high-dose flu vaccines carry a lower risk of myocarditis and cardiovascular events, and flu vaccination offers protection against acute heart failure when administered to hospitalized patients. 

Although the protective effects may be small, the first two studies describe high-dose vaccines outperforming standard seasonal influenza vaccines in older adults. Currently, high-dose vaccines are recommended for use in adults 65 years and older, and they contain roughly four times the antigen—the part of the vaccine that produces antibodies against influenza virus—as standard-dose flu vaccines.

Myocarditis risk lower with high-dose vaccine

In the first study, based on findings from the Pragmatic Randomized Trial to Evaluate the Effectiveness of High-Dose Influenza Vaccines (DANFLU-2 trial) in JAMA Network Open, the risk of myocarditis or pericarditis, or inflammation of the cardiac muscle or membrane around it, was lower in people receiving the high-dose inactivated flu vaccine than in those getting a standard-dose vaccine.

Influenza is a known risk factor for developing myocarditis or pericarditis, and this large Danish study looked at the prevalence of the inflammatory condition across three flu seasons, from 2022 to 2025. Of 332,438 participants randomized, 331,143 did not have a history of myocarditis or pericarditis.

The incidence of myocarditis or pericarditis was lower among participants randomized to receive high-dose influenza vaccine compared to standard dose (19 vs 35 events; relative vaccine effectiveness, 45.7%; 95% confidence interval [CI], 2.5% to 70.7%). 

Study suggests meaningful clinical benefit 

Similarly, a secondary analysis of the same Danish data in JAMA Cardiology finds a small difference in the rate of cardiovascular events that favored the high-dose flu vaccine compared to the standard dose, even among 91,026 participants (27.4%) who had a history of cardiovascular disease. 

During the 2022-23 and 2024-25 flu seasons, the incidence of cardiorespiratory hospitalization was 2.25% in the high-dose group, and 2.38% in the standard-dose group. The difference was driven primarily by a lower incidence of cardiovascular hospitalization (1.30% vs 1.40%), the authors said.

Although the observed absolute differences in outcomes may seem small, they could still represent a potentially meaningful clinical benefit.

“Although the observed absolute differences in outcomes may seem small, they could still represent a potentially meaningful clinical benefit,” they wrote. 

In an editorial on the study, Robert Califf, MD, wrote, “Because of its enormous statistical power and the application of methods that only until recently were technically impracticable, this trial deserves consideration in a broader context than the specific comparison of the effects of 2 vaccine dosages on a specific virus. 

“I hope this study points the way toward a future in which we have much more robust evidence to evaluate vaccines and other therapies intended for broad segments of the population.”

Heart patients do better with vaccination 

Finally, a study across 164 hospitals in China found that administering the flu vaccine during hospitalization for patients with acute heart failure was tied to a 17% lower risk of all-cause mortality or any hospital readmission over 12 months.

The study, published in The Lancet, provides strong evidence to support in-hospital use of influenza vaccination for patients admitted with acute heart failure, the authors said. 

Overall, 7,771 participants were enrolled at 164 hospitals in each winter season between December 2021, and February 2024, with 3,570 assigned to the flu vaccination group and 4,201 to the usual-care (control) group. Among those who were vaccinated, 88.1% received quadrivalent (four-strain) forms of the vaccine.

In the primary analysis, 1,378 (41.2%) of 3,342 patients in the vaccination group and 1,843 (47.0%) of 3,919 patients in the usual-care group experienced the composite end point of all-cause mortality or hospital readmission, which corresponded to an unadjusted odds ratio [OR] of 0.83 (95% CI, 0.72 to 0.97).

“This translates to a number needed to vaccinate at the participating hospitals of 27 (95% CI 14–500) to prevent one death or hospital readmission,” the authors wrote. “The number of patients with at least one serious adverse event was significantly lower in the vaccination group compared with the usual care group.”

In a commentary on the study, Ankeet Bhatt, MD, MBA, of Kaiser Permanente and Stanford University, and Orly Vardeny, PharmD, of the University of Minnesota, write, “The study is an impressive demonstration of implementation science across a wide geographical distribution, including a large number of hospitals over three influenza seasons—the investigators should be commended on their approach and the rigour of this work.”

“The observed effect on all-cause death and all-cause hospitalisation is noteworthy.”