Bio

Professor Julia Newton-Bishop is a clinician scientist leading the Melanoma Research Group(link is external) at the University of Leeds(link is external). This team’s focus is to better understand the factors that could influence a person’s risk of developing this type of skin cancer, and how these could also affect the outlook for patients with the disease.

To do this, Professor Newton-Bishop’s group is scrutinising huge amounts of data and patient samples to see how certain genes, such as those involved in DNA repair, could play a role in the development of the disease. They’ll also be using this pool of information to see whether lifestyle and other factors, such as exposure to particular drugs, can affect survival after the patient has been diagnosed. On top of this, the scientists will be combing through tumour DNA from patients with melanoma in order to increase our understanding of the disease’s biology.

Through this important work, Professor Newton-Bishop’s team will hopefully discover new ways to predict how well melanoma patients are likely to do, which could help doctors make treatment decisions. In addition, the research could identify certain harmful things that patients should avoid, potentially improving survival. By sharing this work through GenoMEL(link is external), an international collaboration on melanoma research, Professor Newton-Bishop will also speed up further developments in the field so that patients can benefit from the findings even sooner.

Website: www.cancerresearchuk.org/our-research/researchers/professor-julia-newton-bishop

Website: www.medicinehealth.leeds.ac.uk/medicine/staff/648/professor-julia-newton-bishop