Senior Stanley Qu Creates DIY Cold Cap to Make Hair Loss Optional During Chemotherapy

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St. Andrew's senior Stanley Qu launched a nonprofit organization, Keep Your Hair, to help cancer patients undergoing treatment be able to avoid hair loss. The 17-year created an innovative do-it-yourself cold cap, which are gel coolant-filled caps, that help patients keep their hair during chemotherapy.  

Qu’s passion for this project began after watching his mother suffer from lung cancer when he was in Lower School. “I don’t remember a lot of it, but what I do remember is that she said, ‘if I have to get chemo and if chemo is the only way I can survive, I will not receive it’ because she didn’t want to lose her hair,” Qu said.   

According to a 2017 clinical trial test from Baylor College of Medicine, 50.5 percent of patients with stage I or II breast cancer successfully retained their hair with the use of the scalp cooling devices. The main reason that scalp-cooling therapy is not utilized often is because it is expensive, and most insurance companies do not cover the treatment.

“The technology behind cold caps has been around for over two decades and it’s nothing new,” Qu explained. “It’s just turned into a profit for these companies. To get the caps, you need around $2,000 to rent them. We want to make it free.”  

Qu wants to provide patients receiving chemotherapy with cold caps free of charge. To accomplish this, he began a fund-raising campaign on Go Fund Me with a $10,000 goal. Keep Your Hair will use these funds to provide oncology clinics and infusion centers with free and reusable cold caps to not only minimize patient hair loss, but hopefully improve the quality of life of cancer patients. He has developed the Keep Your Hair website with specific details and instructional video on how the cold cap works, along with links to his fundraising site. Qu says, “Our main goal is to improve the overall wellbeing of cancer patients, and we can’t do that without the help of others”.