# Applying Genomic Dosimeters of UV Damage to Predicting Skin Cancer Risk

> **NIH NIH R01** · YALE UNIVERSITY · 2021 · $568,838

## Abstract

Project Summary
Cancer prevention programs can reduce cancer incidence, cancer-related deaths, and healthcare costs. Yet
population-level cancer prevention programs are expensive and difficult to implement, and their benefit must
be weighed against the risk of overdiagnosis and harms associated with followup care. An emerging view is
that prevention efforts ought to be focused on the populations at highest risk.
In an era of precision medicine, Precision Prevention would objectively measure a person's past exposure to a
risk factor in order to predict that person's risk of cancer or occupational disease. High-risk individuals would
then be monitored frequently by a specialist. Skin cancers are an ideal starting point because they are nearly
as frequent as all other human cancers combined, the carcinogen is typically ultraviolet light (UV), the
carcinogenic DNA adduct is known to be the cyclobutane pyrimidine dimer (CPD), and the tissue is readily
accessible. The present project takes advantage of two recent technical advances in order to assess individual
risk and answer basic questions about using DNA adductomics for risk prediction.
First, the project uses whole-genome genomics to identify "genomic dosimeters", genome regions in skin that
are up to 1041 fold more sensitive to UV than expected from the genome-wide average. Second, it uses a
nonscarring surfactant-based skin biopsy method (Surfactant-mediated Tissue Acquisition for Molecular
Profiling, STAMP) in order to increase recruitment rates for human studies and allow sampling of multiple non-
diseased sites from a single subject; non-diseased sites reflect the initial exposure more closely than tumor
sites do. The project begins by adapting these methods to small samples of human skin, then determines how
CPDs in genomic dosimeters vary with UV exposure to normal skin, and finally determines how the incidence
of several types of skin cancer varies with the genomic dosimeter CPD level in sun-exposed normal skin, in
order to construct a cancer-probability metric. The results will establish a route to Precision Prevention using
adductomics.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10113619
- **Project number:** 5R01ES030562-03
- **Recipient organization:** YALE UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** DOUGLAS E BRASH
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $568,838
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2019-05-15 → 2025-02-28

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10113619

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10113619, Applying Genomic Dosimeters of UV Damage to Predicting Skin Cancer Risk (5R01ES030562-03). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-06-11 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10113619. Licensed CC0.

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