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cooler head
Kate Diligan spent $8,000 to save her hair during cancer treatment and another $40,000 to see if there was a better way. was.
W.When 45-year-old Jennifer Graf was diagnosed with breast cancer in August, one of her first thoughts was of the woman she sees as an obstetrician-gynecologist. Graff knew she could endure the 12 rounds of chemotherapy she was prescribed. But she worried about how patients would react when she saw one of the more insidious side effects of chemotherapy: hair loss.
“I was worried that people would think I was sick because I had no hair,” says Graf.
Today Graff is on 8 rounds and still has 90% of the hair left. That’s what happens when science meets an entrepreneurial person. Graff uses the Amma cap. This is a portable scalp cooling device that is the brainchild of entrepreneur Kate Dilligan and her startup Cooler Heads.
Diligan founded Cooler Heads in 2018 after spending $8,000 to save her own hair during breast cancer treatment the year before. Scalp cooling, which some patients say feels like an ice pack on their head, helps many patients prevent all or most of their hair from falling out, a common side effect of chemotherapy. It prevents cancer-fighting chemicals from reaching the hair follicles. But Dilligan’s experience was cumbersome and costly, requiring elaborate services to inject chemicals into her body with dry ice packs applied to her head every 20 to 30 minutes. The process worked, but Diligan was convinced there was a better way.
“How do you create something that is portable, affordable, and completely patient manageable without relying on other people?” says Diligan.
When Kate Diligan was being treated for breast cancer in 2016 and 2017, she used a time-consuming and expensive cold capping system to save her hair.
Photo credit: Kate Dilligan
She used $40,000 of her savings to answer the question. Stanford Her Business Technology A graduate of her school and a longtime executive of hers, Diligan uses the network to explore, prototype and test the physics around her portable capping system. I found a design engineer. She has a headpiece that is flexible and secure enough to fit on any person’s head, and a headpiece that stays connected to the cap and stays nearly frozen even after being unplugged and moved with the patient. I wanted a cooling unit that could last.
Diligan joined Technology Accelerator in her hometown of San Diego, raising $1.4 million in a seed round in 2019 to help complete the prototype. By December 2021, Coolerheads Amma Her Cap had been cleared for commercial use by the Food and Drug Administration, allowing Diligan to raise an additional $2.4 million in venture funding. She opened it to the public in July with the aim of renting the caps directly to consumers or selling them to chemical infusion centers so they can be rented to patients. However, due to a combination of demand and recent changes in Medicare billing procedures, Diligan is currently focused solely on sales to infusion centers.
Cooler Heads made more than $250,000 in sales in its first two months on the market, Diligan said. “Demand is really, really strong.”
Chief Medical Officer and executive vice president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, Julie Gralow, said Cooler Heads is a smart product coming to market at the right time. Two of the company’s non-portable competitors, Paxman and Dignicap, received FDA clearance in 2017 and will receive Medicare approval in 2021 with improved ways for hospitals and clinics to claim scalp cooling. access has been expanded. Gralow has been an oncologist for his 30 years and states, “In his last five years of my practice, [cold capping] started to be put into practice. ”
As a patient herself, Kate knows how much hope is put into that little device, and she doesn’t take it lightly.
According to Gralow, one problem with existing systems is that they take up valuable space in chemical injection centers. “You have to plug it in for the coolant to circulate. [and] You have to put the cap on 30 minutes to a few hours before treatment and leave it on afterwards,” she says. , there are few business incentives for infusion centers to let cold-capping patients stay after the end of their infusion. Cooler Heads mobile devices solve that problem.
The Cooler Heads Amma system can be moved with the patient. That means you can catch a cold at home before and after chemotherapy infusions, rather than staying in an infusion clinic for a long time.
Photo credit: Kate Dilligan
“I think this is an important step forward,” says Nancy Marshall, co-founder of the nonprofit The Rapunzel Project. In 2010, Marshall and her friend Shirley Billigmeier spoke to patients about how to access and pay for scalp cooling after Billigmeier’s success in using the treatment to preserve hair during breast cancer treatment in 2009. I founded the Rapunzel Project as a way to educate Marshall has seen other entrepreneurs. Although he seeks to address issues of portability and cost, “Kate is the first to actually develop a viable product and bring it to market,” he says.
Dilligan sells the Cooler Heads Amma cap to infusion centers for $1,250, but the cost to users depends on insurance coverage. As Marshall puts it, guarantees about scalp cooling are “all over the place. I try not to think that.”
Dr. Diligan claims that scalp cooling is medically necessary, with multiple women considering chemotherapy-induced hair loss the most “traumatic” aspect of chemotherapy, with nearly 10% just to avoid it. It points to studies that show that people say they refuse treatment to .
So it’s not about vanity. Many women say it’s a matter of their identity. Siliva Mah, general of Stella Impact Capital, her partner and one of her investors at Cooler Heads, said Dilligan is “giving everyone going through chemotherapy and cancer a dignity and confidence boost.” “We are giving And she’s doing it in a way that “encourages infusion centers to serve more patients with a higher standard of care,” Maher says.
Diligan says he was recently sitting with a patient using Amma Cap who had a mastectomy. “She said losing her hair was harder than losing her breasts,” says Diligan.
Graf, an obstetrician-gynecologist, and other cold sufferers say that cooling the scalp can help patients regain a little bit of control at a time when so many other things are out of control.
“We lose so much, especially for those of us who end up having a mastectomy. It really just happens a lot very quickly,” Graff says. As a patient myself, I knew how much hope there was in that little device, and I didn’t take it lightly.”
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