Mattias Malaguti receives Academy of Medical Sciences Award

Dr Mattias Malaguti, from the Centre for Engineering Biology, has been awarded £125,000 to explore previously invisible battlefields between healthy skin cells and emerging melanoma skin cancer cells.

Melanoma skin cancer is the 5th most commonly diagnosed cancer in the UK, with approximately 17,500 new cases diagnosed annually.

In the UK, it is responsible for more deaths than any other type of skin cancer, as it is likely to spread to other parts of the body – which means early detection is crucial for successful treatment.

Mattias’s study could transform the understanding of the earliest stages of melanoma, and reveal whether there are ways to encourage healthy neighbouring cells to kill off early cancer cells.

This could potentially lead to new preventative treatments that enhance the body’s natural defences against these early cancerous changes.

Mutant melanocytes

Melanoma arises from melanocytes, specialised cells that give skin its colour and help to protect it from the sun’s ultraviolet (UV) radiation.

Mattias’s project will examine whether normal skin cells naturally fight off neighbouring melanocytes which carry early cancer mutations, or whether they unwittingly create an environment that helps cancer thrive.

Melanocytes, like all skin cells, accumulate mutations as we age. Most of the time these are harmless, but too many mutations can lead to melanoma skin cancer.

Most cases of melanoma are caused by too much UV radiation and the incidence of the disease has risen dramatically since the mid-nineties, and is estimated to continue to rise.

New technology

To understand how healthy skin cells respond to mutant melanocytes, Mattias has developed a technology that turns neighbouring healthy skin cells fluorescent in skin cell cultures grown in the laboratory.

It will enable all fluorescent healthy skin cells, sitting next to early cancer cells, to be isolated and compared to non-fluorescent healthy skin cells, which are not close to early cancer cells.

This will allow Mattias to identify molecules that allow healthy cells to sense and respond to mutant melanocytes, painting a detailed picture of their interactions.

The approach is part of the rapidly advancing field of engineering biology, which applies engineering principles to biology, and allows living cells to be reprogrammed with new and useful functions.

The technology developed in this project could not only help to tackle melanoma, but also pave the way for similar studies in other types of cancer and other diseases.