Early Diagnosis of Malignant Melanoma Transformation in Pigmentary Skin Lesions

Malignant Melanoma is a deadly skin cancer that can be cured if diagnosed early. To date atypical pigmented skin lesions are diagnosed by appearance alone and many moles and lesions are excised unnecessarily and on the other hand malignant lesions are missed and diagnosed too late. In this study a protein conjugated to a florescent dye is spread on a suspicious pigmented lesion, the hypothesis is that this protein binds to malignant cells only and thus with a special camera that picks up the dye we can find pigmented lesions with early malignant transformation.