CG2001: A Finasteride-Minoxidil Foam Built for Lower Systemic Exposure
Published by AmpleLab Research
Minoxidil plus finasteride is a pairing that is often recommended, and it has one awkward feature: the finasteride is usually a tablet, with the whole-body exposure that comes with one. CG2001, from Beijing-based Dayspring Pharma, is an attempt to put both drugs in a single scalp foam. In its Phase 1 study, finasteride in the blood at the highest-exposure regimen peaked roughly 30 times below the figure the authors cite for a 1 mg tablet.
In June, the company added an efficacy headline from Phase 2: its best regimen gained 28.17 hairs/cm² over 24 weeks, against 7.68 on placebo. This article keeps two kinds of evidence apart: a peer-reviewed safety and blood-level study that lasted seven days, and an efficacy result that so far exists only as company announcements.
Two Familiar Drugs in One New Foam
CG2001 combines 5% minoxidil with finasteride at strengths from 0.025% to 0.1%, in a foam the developers describe as isopropyl alcohol-free, non-greasy and less prone to running than a liquid. Nothing about the pharmacology is new. Minoxidil promotes growth through a non-hormonal route, and finasteride lowers DHT by inhibiting 5α-reductase. For the wider picture of how finasteride behaves when it is applied to the scalp rather than swallowed, see our piece on topical finasteride versus oral.
What is being tested is the delivery: whether a combination foam can get both drugs to the scalp while keeping finasteride in the bloodstream low. The authors also write, in the introduction to the Phase 1 paper, that mouse studies showed CG2001 acting faster than minoxidil alone and outperforming either drug on its own. No data for that are shown in the paper, so it stays a company assertion.
Dayspring funded the Phase 1 study and supplied the foam. One author, Baohui Yu, is a Dayspring employee and is named as the company's chief executive in its June release; he is one of three authors credited with equal contribution to the data analysis and writing. The remaining authors declared no conflicts of interest, and their affiliations span Peking University People's Hospital, Peking University and Xuzhou Medical University. Peking University People's Hospital also led the Phase 2 trial, and its dermatologist Cheng Zhou, a Phase 1 author, presented the Phase 2 results.
Phase 1: Forty-Four Men, One Gram, Seven Days
The first human study of CG2001 ran from March to June 2024 at a single site, Peking University People's Hospital, and was published in early 2026. It is the only peer-reviewed human data on the product, and what it measures is narrow: safety, and how much of each drug reaches the bloodstream.
A single-centre, randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled Phase 1 study of 44 men with Norwood-Hamilton III vertex to V androgenetic alopecia, drawn from 81 screened: 36 received CG2001 and 8 received placebo foam. Cohort 1 (4 men, open-label) had a single dose of 5% minoxidil with 0.025% finasteride. Cohorts 2 to 5 (10 men each, 8 active and 2 placebo) used 0.05%, 0.075% or 0.1% finasteride once daily, or 0.1% twice daily, for seven days of dosing. Each application was 1 g of foam, weighed to 0.0001 g and spread over a marked 50 cm² patch of scalp, then left undisturbed for 12 hours. Fifteen men (34.1%) reported 20 treatment-emergent adverse events: 12 of the 36 on CG2001 (33.3%) and 3 of the 8 on placebo (37.5%). There were no serious adverse events and none led to withdrawal. The most frequent in the active group were contact dermatitis (4 men, 11.1%) and raised blood triglycerides (3 men, 8.3%). One grade 3 event, raised creatine phosphokinase, was judged unrelated. One grade 1 rise in conjugated bilirubin, in a man whose baseline was already slightly elevated, was counted as drug-related, though the authors call the link inconclusive; it normalised on retest. Serum testosterone stayed in the normal range and no sexual-function adverse events were reported, but the authors note that no validated sexual-function scales were used.
That is a clean-looking safety result, within limits. Adverse event rates on the foam and on placebo foam were similar, and skin reactions dominated, which fits a topical product. But seven days in 36 men on active drug can only speak to acute problems. It cannot speak to the concerns people have about long-term finasteride use, which build over months or years or affect a minority.
Two housekeeping points. The ClinicalTrials.gov record was posted in June 2025, about a year after dosing ended. The paper also cites a Chinese registry number, CTR20240710. And the paper's counts of drug-related events differ slightly between passages, though every version describes a handful of mild events, mostly contact dermatitis.
The Blood Levels: What "Thirty-Fold Lower" Means
The paper's selling point is how little finasteride reaches the blood. After seven days of dosing, peak plasma levels at steady state (geometric means, in pg/mL) were:
The headline comparison is between the highest-exposure regimen, 0.1% twice daily, and a 1 mg finasteride tablet. The foam produced a peak of 272.53 pg/mL. The authors set that against 9.20 ng/mL for oral 1 mg, taken from a separate study, which is where the claim of a reduction of more than 30-fold comes from (9,200 divided by 272.5 is about 34).
Three things are worth holding alongside that number. First, it is a peak-level comparison across two different studies. On total exposure, the paper's own figures (5,775 h·pg/mL for the foam, 53.00 ng·h/mL for oral) imply a reduction nearer nine-fold, which is still large but not 30. Second, the Phase 2's best regimen, 0.075% twice daily, was not one of the Phase 1 regimens, so its blood levels were not measured. Third, lower is not the same as none, as a trial of a different topical finasteride shows.
A phase III randomised trial of a topical finasteride spray in men with androgenetic alopecia. At week 24, mean maximum plasma finasteride was 48.0 pg/mL on the spray against 5,029 pg/mL on oral finasteride, yet serum DHT still fell by 34.6% on the spray, compared with 55.6% on oral and no change on placebo. Target area hair count rose by 20.2 on the spray, 21.1 on oral finasteride and 6.7 on placebo. The trial was funded by Almirall, and several authors are Almirall employees.
That result cuts both ways. Topical finasteride can grow hair with blood levels around a hundred-fold below oral, which is encouraging for the whole approach. But serum DHT still fell by about a third, so low blood levels did not mean no systemic effect. The CG2001 paper reports serum testosterone in its main text but not DHT, so it does not tell us how far this foam lowers DHT in the body.
There is also a timing question. The paper reports median finasteride half-lives at steady state of 67 to 227 hours and an accumulation ratio of about 13 in the twice-daily cohort, while also stating that steady state was reached by day 7. Those statements sit uneasily together: a drug with a half-life of days normally needs weeks, not one, to plateau. The apparent half-life of a topically applied drug can be influenced by prolonged absorption from the skin, rather than reflecting elimination from the bloodstream alone. That may help explain the unusually long estimates, but the paper does not resolve the tension between them and its steady-state claim. Longer-term pharmacokinetic data would show how blood concentrations behave during continued daily use, and blood levels after months of use could differ from the seven-day figures.
For minoxidil, steady-state peaks in the three higher cohorts were 852 to 992 pg/mL, which the authors set against 1.11 to 1.64 ng/mL for marketed foams and 2.13 ng/mL for a spray reported in the literature. That is lower again, though across studies again. One oddity: every cohort received the same 5% minoxidil, yet the 0.05% finasteride cohort had roughly half the exposure of the others, with only eight men on active drug and wide scatter. Per-cohort differences of that kind should be treated as noise unless shown otherwise. The authors also report single-dose minoxidil half-lives from about 35 to over 5,000 hours, and say themselves that this is an artefact of analysing a slowly absorbed topical drug, not a true clearance time.
Reading the Number
The roughly 30-fold figure compares peak finasteride concentrations after seven days of dosing with a value from a separate study of oral finasteride 1 mg. It suggests that systemic peak exposure was substantially lower with this foam under the tested conditions. It does not show a 30-fold reduction in total exposure or fewer side effects, and the study was too short to assess long-term tolerability.
Phase 2: Efficacy, So Far, by Press Release
The efficacy case rests on a 110-man, multicentre, randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled Phase 2 trial led by Peking University People's Hospital. Dayspring has announced results twice, and neither announcement has been accompanied by a paper.
Sponsored by Beijing Dayspring Pharmaceutical Technology, with 110 participants: men aged 18 to 65 with Norwood-Hamilton grade IIIv, IV or V androgenetic alopecia. The study started on 5 December 2024 and is listed as completed, with the record last updated in March 2026 and an estimated completion date of September 2025. Sites are listed at eight hospitals in Beijing, Wuhan, Changsha, Nanchang, Shanghai and Hangzhou. Exclusions include oral finasteride or dutasteride within the previous year, topical minoxidil within six months, and previous regular minoxidil use of four months or more that had not worked. The trial is also listed in China's registry as CTR20244289, which a Chinese trial-data aggregator shows as first publicly disclosed on 15 November 2024, before the first participant was enrolled on 8 December 2024, with 110 enrolled.
That last exclusion is worth a second look. Barring men who had already tried minoxidil for months without benefit may have enriched the trial for men more likely to respond to a minoxidil-containing product, though the registry does not say how that was weighed.
In April 2026, a Dayspring release said the 30-week trial had met its primary endpoint, that all CG2001 groups showed a "markedly superior improvement trend" over placebo at week 24, and that the best group's efficacy was about 50% higher than other registered data, including published Chinese minoxidil foam studies. That is a comparison across different trials, so it cannot tell us how CG2001 would do against those products in the same men. The release gave no endpoint definition, effect size or p-value.
Presented orally at the 14th World Congress for Hair Research in Seoul by Professor Cheng Zhou of Peking University People's Hospital, and described by the company as the first public disclosure of the results. The arms were 5% minoxidil with 0.075% finasteride once daily, 5% minoxidil with 0.1% finasteride once daily, 5% minoxidil with 0.075% finasteride twice daily, and a control group. The primary endpoint, change in target area hair count from baseline at week 24, was reported as met by the twice-daily 0.075% arm versus placebo: an increase of 28.17 hairs/cm² (p=0.006) against 7.68 hairs/cm² on placebo. The release also reports a trend towards sustained increases at weeks 6, 12, 18 and 24 and a trend towards better self-assessment. It reports no "sex-related adverse events", without defining the term, and describes adverse events overall as mild to moderate. It gives no sample size, no figures for the other arms and no confidence intervals.
Taking the numbers at face value, the gap between the best arm and placebo is about 20.5 hairs/cm² (our subtraction). Target area hair count is a hair count in a small marked area of scalp; we explain how it is measured in our GT20029 article. The placebo arm gaining 7.68 is a reminder that placebo arms move too.
For scale, and with heavy caution, the topical finasteride spray trial above gained 20.2 against 6.7 on placebo at 24 weeks, a gap of 13.5. Different men, a different country and different counting methods mean the two sets of numbers cannot be lined up. The more important point is structural. 5% minoxidil foam has its own record against placebo, including a 352-man trial in which it beat placebo at 16 weeks. A placebo-controlled Phase 2 can show that CG2001 beats placebo, but it cannot show that finasteride adds anything to minoxidil, and that is the claim a combination product has to earn.
Other gaps are worth listing. The company has not said how the 110 men were split across arms (about 27 per arm if evenly, which is our arithmetic, not a stated figure). It has not said whether the p-value allowed for three active arms being compared with one control. It has not given results for the once-daily or 0.1% arms, so the April claim that all groups improved and the June focus on one arm cannot be reconciled from public information. The two releases also describe adverse events slightly differently, as mild and mainly itching and scaling in April, and mild to moderate in June. And the next step is described differently: April says Phase III development will continue, while June says Dayspring is engaging regulators to define the next phase.
What We Know, and What We Don't
Reported in a peer-reviewed paper
A seven-day Phase 1 in 44 men: no serious adverse events, mostly mild skin reactions at rates similar to placebo foam, and finasteride blood levels well below the cited oral 1 mg figure. The authors are linked to the sponsor.
Reported by the company only
A Phase 2 in 110 men in which the best arm gained 28.17 hairs/cm² against 7.68 on placebo at 24 weeks (p=0.006), with a good tolerability profile. No paper, sample sizes per arm or results for the other arms.
Not yet public
Serum DHT on this foam, long-term safety, sexual function measured with validated scales, results for the other Phase 2 arms, and any comparison with minoxidil alone or finasteride alone.
Availability
Investigational. No approval filing has been announced that we know of, and anything sold online under the name CG2001 would be unverified.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is CG2001?
CG2001 is an investigational topical foam from Dayspring Pharma that combines 5% minoxidil with finasteride at strengths between 0.025% and 0.1%. It is being studied for male androgenetic alopecia in China, with a Phase 1 safety and blood-level study published and a Phase 2 efficacy trial reported by the company.
Does CG2001 work better than minoxidil or finasteride alone?
That has not been shown. The Phase 2 trial was placebo-controlled, and the company reported that its best regimen gained 28.17 hairs/cm² against 7.68 on placebo at 24 weeks. A trial with a minoxidil-only or finasteride-only arm would be needed to show what each drug adds.
Does CG2001 have fewer side effects than oral finasteride?
It puts much less finasteride in the blood: in Phase 1, peak levels at the highest-exposure regimen were roughly 30 times below a figure the authors cite for a 1 mg tablet. Whether that translates into fewer side effects has not been tested. The study lasted seven days, no sexual-function adverse events were reported, and the authors state that validated sexual-function scales were not used.
How is CG2001 different from existing topical minoxidil and finasteride products?
It combines both drugs in one isopropyl alcohol-free foam and comes with measured blood-level data for each. Minoxidil foams and topical finasteride sprays each have their own trials, and the Phase 1 paper notes that combined alcohol-based solutions are already available in some markets, such as India. What CG2001 adds is the single foam and its dose ratio, not a new mechanism.
Is CG2001 approved or available?
No. It is investigational and, to our knowledge, not approved by any regulator. In April 2026 the company said it planned Phase III development, and in June it said it was engaging regulators to define the next phase. For how it sits among other candidates, see our pipeline tracker. Any product sold online under the name CG2001 should be treated as unverified; its identity and contents cannot be assumed.
Selected Research
This article is provided for educational purposes and does not constitute medical or investment advice. CG2001 is an investigational product. To our knowledge, it has not been approved by the FDA, MHRA, NMPA or any other regulatory authority, and its safety and efficacy have not been established. AmpleLab products are unrelated to CG2001 and are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any condition.
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