Liz Patton Research Group

Section: Disease Models

Research in a Nutshell 

Melanoma (cancer of the melanocyte) kills over 20,000 Europeans each year and incidence continues to rise rapidly. While melanoma mostly affects older people, in fact, melanoma is one of the rapidly rising cancers in young adults, especially young women. BRAF^V600E inhibitors and immune therapy have led to clinically significant improvements in outcomes for melanoma patients, yet many patients with metastatic melanoma rapidly succumb to the disease due to eventual chemoresistance, or insensitivity to the drug. Thus, it is critical to identify new therapies that can act alone or be combined with available treatments for enhanced efficacy and/or to overcome drug resistance.

Our research is focused on understanding how melanocytes – the pigment cells that become melanoma – develop, divide, migrate and maintain homeostasis within their micro-environment, as well as the genetic and cellular events that cause melanocytes to form moles and their progression to invasive cancer. To do this, we use the zebrafish system, which allows both the visualization of developing and migrating melanocytes, as well as their aberrant progression to melanoma. Further, we can use this model system to understand the mechanisms that lead to drug resistance and for pre-clinical drug trials. 

The zebrafish is a powerful model system to study developmental biology, chemical biology and disease models. Due to the similar genetic, molecular and cancer pathology between humans and fish, our melanoma progression model can be viewed as an important starting point for identifying novel genes, environmental conditions, and therapeutic compounds that affect melanoma progression. 

We use genetics, cellular genomics, live imaging and chemical-biology to discover the fundamental processes that contribute to melanocyte development during embryogenesis, and explore how these processes become dysregulated in melanoma. Our lab at the MRC Human Genetics Unit has close collaborations with the CRUK Scotland Centre, and ultimately, we aim to translate our discoveries in zebrafish to the understanding and treatment of human disease. We have two zebrafish facilities at the IGC led by Dr Cameron Wyatt. We have access to a wide range of transgenic and genetic lines, diverse chemical libraries, and adjacent state-of-the-art imaging, FACS and cellular genomics facilities.