BOSTON--Findings from a study led by researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Children's Hospital Boston have rewritten science's understanding of the process of skin tanning -- an insight that has enabled them to develop a promising way of protecting fair-skinned people from skin cancer caused by exposure to sunlight.
The study, to be published by the journal Nature in its Sept. 21 issue, involved giving tans to specially engineered mice, not by exposing them to ultraviolet rays in sunlight (the usual route to a tan), but by applying a cream that switched on the tanning machinery in their skin cells. Because people who tan easily, or have naturally dark skin, are far less likely to develop skin cancer than fair-skinned individuals -- who tend to get sunburns rather than tans -- the findings suggests that medicinally-induced tans can protect at-risk individuals from the disease.
"The study involved using a small molecule to essentially mimic the process that occurs when skin cells are struck by ultraviolet light from the sun," says the study's senior author, David E. Fisher, MD, PhD, director of the Melanoma Program at Dana-Farber and a professor in pediatrics at Children's Hospital Boston. While the compound used in the study has not yet been tested in humans, the results "demonstrate the principle that actual tanning can be 'rescued' by recognizing the normal pathway and the precise step where it is blocked in people who do not tan well," he remarks.
Melanoma is the fastest-increasing form of cancer in the world, accounting for 62,000 new cases in the United States every year and nearly 8,000 deaths, according to the American Cancer Society. It occurs when pigment-making skin cells called melanocytes begin dividing rampantly as a result of damage to their DNA. If melanoma tumors are detected and surgically removed before their cells spread to other parts of the body, patients have an almost 100 percent chance of surviving. Th
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Contact: Bill Schaller
william_schaller@dfci.harvard.edu
617-632-5357
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
20-Sep-2006