Chemotherapy can save lives, but it comes with some unpleasant side effects.
The drugs target rapidly dividing cells, which allows them to home in on tumors, but they also kill normal cells such as those in hair follicles. Although the resulting hair loss is not life-threatening, it can be extremely distressful to patients. Now a team reports that they can prevent chemotherapy-induced hair loss in rats by first rubbing the animals' skin with a newly developed drug. Many researchers in both industry and academe are looking for CDK inhibitors, mainly in hope of developing agents to block the growth of cancer cells. But William Kaelin of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, who is among those doing this work, points out that CDK inhibitors offer two possibilities.