New Zealand and Australia share the unenviable status of having the highest incidence of skin cancers in the world. Two thirds of fair skinned Europeans here will develop a non-melanoma skin cancer such as BCC or SCC in their lifetime, with one in fifteen developing the deadly malignant melanoma. However, if detected early enough, malignant melanoma can have a good prognosis.
For many patients, primary care physicians like GPs are their first point of call. Most have not had extensive dermatology training and tend to over-refer lesions for biopsy, as they do not want to miss a clinically significant lesion that may require urgent treatment. This results in up to 9 out of 10 unnecessary biopsies causing unnecessary scarring1. Vibrational spectroscopy presents an ideal solution to minimize such unnecessary biopsies, through non-invasive interrogation of the biomolecules in skin lesions. Raman spectroscopy in particular is highly suitable as it is exquisitely sensitive to changes in the protein and lipid biomolecules induced by skin cancer, yet insensitive to the high water content in skin. Recent advances in semiconductor technologies has led to the availability of small portable Raman systems with fibre optic probes that are suitable for deployment in the clinical setting. Here we present a study, that combined chemometrics and Raman spectroscopy2, to develop guide that primary physicians can use to accurately, non-invasively and rapidly differentiate malignant from benign skin lesions: a non-invasive optical biopsy.