Hands, Feet, and Fins: The Connection That Explains Acral Melanoma

Source: Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, March 2022

To understand cancer in humans, researchers at the Sloan Kettering Institute (SKI) are turning to our distant relatives from 425 million years ago: fish.

A lot has evolved since then: Fish use their fins to swim, whereas we use our hands to play Wordle.

But there remains a deep similarity, explains Richard White, a physician-scientist in the Cancer Biology and Genetics Program at SKI. “The genes that determine how humans develop fingers are similar to the ones that determine how fish get fins,” Dr. White says. “This gene program has been deeply conserved throughout evolution.”

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