Researchers from UCLA's cancer and stem cell centers have demonstrated for the first time that blood stem cells can be engineered to create cancer-killing T-cells that seek out and attack a human melanoma. The researchers believe this approach could be useful in 40 percent of Caucasians with this malignancy.

Done in mouse models, the study serves as first proof-of-principle that blood stem cells, which make every cell type found in blood, can be genetically altered in a living organism to create an army of melanoma-fighting T-cells, said Jerome Zack, study senior author and a scientist with UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA.

An extraordinary breakthrough in understanding what stops a common form of skin cancer from developing could make new cancer treatments and prevention available to the public in five years.

In research published in the leading international cancer journal, Cancer Cell, an international team of scientists led by Professor Stephen Jane and Dr Charbel Darido of Monash University's Department of Medicine at the Alfred Hospital, has discovered a gene that helps protect the body from squamous cell cancer (SCC) of the skin.

ONCOLOGY: Stopping breast cancer spread

Most people who die from breast cancer do not die as a result of their breast tumor but because their cancer has spread (metastasized) to other parts of their body, often their lungs or bones. A team of researchers led by Richard Kremer, at McGill University Health Centre, Montréal, has used a mouse model of human breast cancer to identify a potential new target for slowing breast tumor progression and metastasis.

Research from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill suggests that the timing of exposure to UV rays - early in the morning or later in the afternoon - can influence the onset of skin cancer.

The study, performed in mice, found that exposure to UV radiation in the morning increased the risk of skin cancer by 500 percent over identical doses in the afternoon. Although mice and humans both reside on a 24-hour day, the "circadian" clocks of these nocturnal and diurnal creatures run counter each other. This key difference in biology means that humans are most protected from the sun's harmful rays when mice are most susceptible, and vice versa.

Researchers at the University of Leeds, funded by Cancer Research UK, suggest that people with very pale skin may be unable to spend enough time in the sun to make the amount of vitamin D the body needs - while also avoiding sunburn.

The study, published in Cancer Causes and Control*, suggested that melanoma patients may need vitamin D supplements as well.

But researchers also noted that sunlight and supplements are not the only factors that can determine the level of vitamin D in a person's body.

Some inherited differences in the way people's bodies process vitamin D into the active form also have a strong effect on people's vitamin D levels.