Aotearoa is home to the world’s highest melanoma rates, driven in part by our harsh UV rays. Each year, thousands of Kiwis are diagnosed, and for some, melanoma can spread rapidly from a small skin cancer to other parts of the body. 

To understand why melanoma can become so aggressive, Professor Mike Eccles and his team at the University of Otago turned to a precious resource: melanoma cell lines generously donated by patients.

Many of these cell lines had already been DNA-sequenced, with their mutations catalogued. The team then sequenced the RNA from each cell line. RNA acts as the go-between that helps translate a gene’s DNA into proteins — by analysing the RNA, the team could search for patterns and pathways linked to aggressive behaviour and metastasis.

There was a catch: the data were enormous and would require significant time using specialised tools. Even simple questions could take hours — sometimes days — to answer. Thanks to generous donor support through Cancer Research Trust New Zealand, the team hired programming and bioinformatics student Antonio Ahn to solve that bottleneck. Together, Eccles and Ahn built a user-friendly Shiny App — a secure web portal that packages expert analyses so researchers can run standard queries in seconds.

This has resulted in faster insights from patient-donated samples, and more time for bioinformaticians to focus on the complex analyses that drive discovery.

Already, the team has uncovered clues to why some melanomas don’t respond to immunotherapies such as Keytruda — knowledge that could help match the right treatments to the right patients. Building on this momentum, Professor Eccles has since secured government funding to expand the work and search for additional markers of treatment response and metastasis.

This is groundbreaking mahi made possible by donors. By backing Cancer Research Trust NZ, you’ve helped decode data into a tool that accelerates melanoma research nationwide — bringing personalised treatment one step closer for New Zealanders.

"Thank you CRTNZ for supporting novel ideas and the next generation of talented researchers in New Zealand" 
– Professor Mike Eccles