Enzymes May Be Able To Give You A Real Tan Without The Damage

Sun worshippers might someday be able to get a tan without exposing their skin to the harmful ultraviolet radiation that’s responsible for skin cancers, a new study suggests. The goal of the research is to prevent skin cancers by darkening the pigmentation of people’s skin, senior author Dr. David Fisher told Reuters Health. “Very light skin and a very poor ability to tan correlates with a very high probability of developing cancer,” said Fisher, who is chief of the dermatology service at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Darker skin may block harmful UV radiation, Fisher said, so it’s possible that darkening the skin’s pigmentation might help neutralize the risk associated with genes for light-colored hair and fair skin. A decade ago, Fisher’s team found a way to change the pigmentation of skin cells in mice from very fair to dark, which protected their cells from the type of UV damage that can lead to skin cancer. Unfortunately, the topical agent that worked to darken the skin of mice didn’t work as effectively on thicker human skin.  Since then, the researchers have been trying to find alternative ways to achieve the same goal in humans, Fisher said. Eventually, they identified enzymes ― called small-molecule salt-inducible kinases ― that help control pigmentation in a cell. When the researchers applied the enzymes onto mice and samples of human skin in a lab, both the mice and the human skin turned increasi...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news