Skin cancer: Help fund research into genes and lifestyle choices

What's the science behind this research?

Most skin cancers are caused by damage from the sun’s harmful UV rays or sunbeds. But sun damage is not the whole story. Our genes can also influence the development of skin cancer, and some skin cancers can be caused by certain strains of a common virus called human papilloma virus.

Here are some examples of our skin cancer work:

Studying non-melanoma skin cancer

Professor Irene Leigh at the University of Dundee heads up the Cancer Research UK Skin Tumour Laboratory. She is a leading expert on non-melanoma skin cancer and is studying how this cancer develops in a variety of ways.

Some of her work is focused on finding the rogue genes that contribute to the development of the disease, and to identifying the earliest genetic changes in skin cells that put them on the path to becoming cancerous. Her work may reveal new ways to treat non-melanoma skin cancer.

Identifying people at higher risk of malignant melanoma

Malignant melanoma is the most dangerous form of skin cancer. Professor Julia Newton-Bishop, from the Leeds Institute of Molecular Medicine is looking at how a family history of this disease can make some people more likely to develop it.

Professor Newton-Bishop is also looking at how our lifestyle choices interact with our genes to affect our risk of cancer, including whether our genes give us different "tolerances" to sun exposure. This work could help to reveal new ways to identify people at higher risk and treat this dangerous disease.

The difference you can make

Cancer Research UK first made the link between sun exposure and skin cancer back in 1935 and have continued to try and raise awareness ever since. And we’ve successfully lobbied to make sunbed use by young people under 18 years old illegal in England.

We’ve also been behind several discoveries which have revealed more about skin cancer and how to treat it. For example, our scientists discovered that faults in a gene called BRAF contribute to over half of all cases of melanoma skin cancer. Since then, our scientists have led efforts to develop drugs that target this gene, and drugs targeting BRAF are now showing promise in clinical trials.

We want to raise £35,000 which is the equivalent of one year’s worth of DNA profiling for a project like Professor Newton-Bishop’s. It’s with your help that we can continue groundbreaking work like this, which could lead to new discoveries that may save more lives from this disease.