Shutting Down Skin Cancer

Source: BU Today, March 2019

Melanoma is commonly caused by the damaging effects of ultraviolet light—from sources like sunlight and tanning beds—on the DNA of skin cells. This UV damage can activate genes that encourage precancerous cells to further mutate into full-blown skin cancer. At the same time, UV damage can turn off other genes that would normally prevent tumor growth. With enough wrongly flipped switches, cancer can flourish. And melanoma is certainly flourishing. This year alone, 96,480 new instances of melanoma will be diagnosed in the United States and 7,230 Americans will die from the disease.

With so many people affected by melanoma, scientists are on the hunt for better ways to screen for melanoma risk and treat the most lethal types of skin cancer. One particularly voracious type of melanoma, caused by mutation of a gene called NRAS (which instructs cells to produce a protein of the same name, NRAS), drives 25 percent of skin cancers.

“There are immunotherapies and targeted therapies that have shown huge improvements for patients with melanoma,” says Rutao Cui, a Boston University School of Medicine professor of pharmacology and dermatology. “However, for patients with NRAS mutations, they don’t have very useful or very effective treatment strategies.”