Who’s behind MyMelanoma?

We are a group of UK scientists and medical professionals, business development minds and melanoma patients that have teamed up to lead a unique, large-scale patient study working alongside melanoma sufferers. The study will use online recruitment and will collect information directly from those participants, so that any UK melanoma patient can take part independently of the NHS thereby conserving the time of NHS workers and NHS costs.

In the UK, in contrast to other countries, cancer care is delivered by multidisciplinary teams distributed across the country. Care is also informed by national bodies such as NICE, and the goverment requires those teams to collect standard data sets about the care given to patients. THis system is designed to ensure equality of high quality care across the regions. The data sets that the centres are obliged to collect are stored by the NHS in organisations legally permitted to store information about cancer, currently Public Health England. These data are potentially very important for research and therefore in recent years much effort has been made to make anonymous data available safely to UK researchers on application. The MyMelanoma study is only possible if the participant entered information is linked up to this anonymized  NHS data stored by governmental agencies such as NHS Digital and Public Health England. The UK is in a unique position internationally to build a very large study such as this.