Posted on August 5, 2004 at 9:40 a.m.

BIRMINGHAM, AL — A University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) scientist is directing a national research study of a drug that may help repair sun-damaged skin and keep it from developing into skin cancer.

Dr. Craig Elmets will test dimericine, the so-called morning-after cream, with people who have had kidney transplants. Transplant patients take drugs that diminish their own immune defenses and make them at increased risk of developing skin cancers.

“Forty percent of such patients will develop skin cancers,” said Elmets, professor and chair of UAB’s dermatology department and a senior scientist at the UAB Comprehensive Cancer Center. “We will follow a total of 60 patients who already have a history of cancers and precancers of the skin. The double-blind, placebo-controlled study will be conducted at UAB, Emory University, and the universities of Pennsylvania, Michigan and California-San Francisco. At the end of three years we will have a good idea of whether this drug lowers this very high risk of skin cancer.”

The drug, a topical lotion manufactured by AGI Dermatics of Long Island, New York, will be applied daily on transplant patients’ sun-exposed skin for the duration of the clinical trial.

“Most of us have an enzyme in our skin that repairs DNA that has been damaged by the ultraviolet rays of the sun, but this protective system is overwhelmed in people on transplant drugs and with some other conditions,” Elmets said. There is even some evidence to suggest one of immune system-suppressing drugs used by transplant patients actually inhibits their own repair of damaged DNA.

“When a person is placed on immunosuppressants, that surveillance mechanism that protects against skin cancers breaks down. This test product seeks to supplement the body’s own DNA repair enzymes. It proved successful in an earlier study of people with a very rare genetic disorder, xeroderma pigmentosum,” he said. “Eventually there’s a chance the replacement enzymes would be used by the general population.”

Currently, to reduce their chances of getting skin cancer, transplant patients use liberal amounts of sunscreen, avoid the sun when possible, and in severe cases, reduce their dosages of immunosuppressant medicines.

UAB is a major organ transplant center, and consistently performs more kidney transplants than any other single center in the United States.