Team goes molecular to battle melanoma
BU researchers develop skin-cancer rescue for redheads
Boston University researchers have made crucial headway on a technique to protect redheads from the deadliest form of skin cancer, which the predominately pale population is up to 100 times more likely to develop.
“Every summer, many of us can just go and enjoy the sun, but red-haired people can’t do that,” said one of the lead researchers, BU Pharmacology postdoc Shuyang Chen. “The sunlight is very dangerous to them. We wanted to focus on how to let them enjoy the sun.”
Fiery-headed folks are born with a mutation in a gene
— MC1R — responsible for making proteins that protect our skin from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays. Because they lack these proteins, they are between 10 and 100 times more susceptible to developing melanoma.
Chen and his colleagues engineered mice to have the same mutation, and injected the redfurred rodents with a small molecule to increase the production of a key protein that redheads lack, according to the study published yesterday in the journal Nature.
The mice were exposed to UV light for a month. Three months later, 60 percent of those that were not treated with the molecule developed melanoma, compared to only 20 percent of the mice that had received the molecule injections. “We figured out how to protect the skin by enhancing the function of that protein,” Chen said. Melanoma strikes when ultraviolet rays cause damage to the DNA in skin cells.
This causes the cells to multiply uncontrollably, forming deadly tumors.
The researchers have been working on ways to decrease skin cancer risks for redheads since 2013, said Dr. Rutao Cui, professor of pharmacology and dermatology at BU School of Medicine.
“We figured out why people with red hair are so prone to melanoma,” Cui said. “Now we’re finding ways to rescue that defect.”
The next step, they said, is to test the molecule by applying it directly to the skin rather than injecting it — testing its potential for use in future sunscreen products.
If successful, the goal is to treat humans within 10 years.
Redheads make up about 1 percent to 2 percent of the world’s population, but comprise roughly 16 percent of the melanoma patients worldwide.
It is estimated that 87,110 new cases of invasive melanoma will be diagnosed in the U.S. in 2017, and about 9,730 of those cases will likely be fatal.
Although melanoma is responsible for less than 1 percent of skin cancer cases, it causes a majority of skin cancer deaths.
‘We figured out why people with red hair are so prone to melanoma. Now we’re finding ways to rescue that defect.’ — Dr. RUTAO CUI, professor of pharmacology and dermatology, Boston University School of Medicine