Andrew Jaffe is giving Emory scientists room to explore a bold idea. 

Andrew Jaffe MD, a board-certified dermatologist and Mohs surgeon in Naples, Florida, has spent years noticing patterns and making diagnoses. One observation about melanoma has stuck with him: The disease appears less likely to become aggressive and spread in areas of the body that receive chronic sun exposure versus those areas with intermittent, intense exposure.

That observation led Jaffe to an unconventional question: Could chronic exposure to ultraviolet (UV) light actually help slow the spread of melanoma? Perhaps the biology might be more complicated than the usual public-health message allows

This kind of question needed a research lab — and financial support. Jaffe himself stepped up with philanthropy that now supports research at Emory to determine whether the pattern he noticed points to something real in the biology of melanoma.

Through a mutual acquaintance, physician-scientist Brian Pollack, MD, PhD, a former professor at Emory School of Medicine, Jaffe’s question reached Lindsey Seldin, PhD, an assistant professor in the Department of Cell Biology at Emory School of Medicine who was just building her lab. Seldin studies the inner machinery that helps cells grow, divide, and move through the body. In melanoma, movement changes everything. A tumor on the skin can often be treated. The real danger begins when cancer cells break away, travel, and take hold elsewhere. That process, known as metastasis, can make melanoma lethal.

If the work uncovers a biological pathway that influences how melanoma cells move and spread, it could eventually help researchers find new ways to predict, slow, or target metastasis — without changing the basic public-health message that UV exposure can cause harm.

Melanoma was not part of Seldin’s original plan when she launched her lab in 2022. She was already building studies of other forms of skin cancer while doing what all new principal investigators must: hiring, troubleshooting, and stretching every dollar. Taking on a third cancer type was no small decision. 

“I was initially hesitant,” Seldin says. “But Andrew’s mechanistic interest in how the melanoma cells migrate to become more invasive — that’s completely in my wheelhouse.”

Jaffe never saw his role as proving the theory himself. He saw it as helping the right scientists test it. 

“This started as a hunch I carried for a long time from seeing patients over many years, not as something I could prove myself,” Jaffe says. “What appealed to me was the chance to give that question a fair scientific test. Lindsey has the kind of curiosity and expertise to follow the biology where it leads, and I feel fortunate to have helped create the opportunity for that work to begin.”

Even if Jaffe’s original hunch turned out to be wrong, the biology underneath it still seemed worth exploring. But the idea presented a familiar challenge: How could Seldin attract enough support to determine whether this early research idea would hold up? Promising ideas often outpace the funding needed to test them. Major federal grants usually require preliminary data, but gathering that evidence takes people, supplies, equipment, and time. 

Jaffe understood that the project would be exploratory — the kind of work that can struggle to win traditional support at the outset — so he chose to invest directly. His gift gave Seldin’s lab what many bold ideas need at the start: a fighting chance.

For a young investigator still building her lab, this gift offered something especially valuable: the freedom to explore an early-stage idea before more traditional funders would be ready to take the risk. The funding has helped support salaries, purchase supplies and equipment for the next stage of experiments, and acquire a new UV system.

In Seldin’s lab, the project has already begun to widen. Seldin has engaged Dorothy Lerit, PhD, an Emory Cell Biology Department colleague who studies the internal structures that help cells organize themselves and move. Together, Lerit and Seldin’s team are examining whether metastatic melanoma cells show distinct changes in those structures and whether UV exposure alters the cells’ ability to migrate.

For Seldin, that visual dimension is part of the appeal. Long drawn to theater and the arts, she is captivated by images of cells under a microscope and by the chance to make that hidden world seem real.

The science is complicated, but the question is simple: Could the same source that helps cause skin cancer also influence how aggressively some melanoma cells behave? Seldin is cautious. The team has seen intriguing differences between metastatic and non-metastatic melanoma cells, and in early migration experiments UV-exposed cells appeared to move more slowly. But early signals are not conclusions. The work is still in the slow phase of testing and refining.

Next comes the harder work of testing whether those early signals hold. Seldin’s team is now repeating the migration experiments with a more advanced UV system. The research is also moving into mouse models. In those models, the team will determine whether the same changes appear in intact tissue and how melanoma cells move in a living system. 

If all goes well, Seldin hopes the group can post a summer preprint on the work so far — an important step in preparing a Department of Defense team-science grant application. Most people only hear about research once the answers are clearer. They rarely see this earlier stage, when methods are still being adjusted and no one yet knows whether a hunch will pan out.

Philanthropy often matters most at this stage. By helping prepare a project for federal funding, donors give researchers time to build collaborations, gather evidence, and make a stronger case to larger funders. For Seldin, that process has already begun. She hopes the early data from this work will help support her team-science grant, which will bring in more than $1 million over several years.

The preparation to secure a larger grant is just one possible return on Jaffe’s philanthropic investment. Another is the ability it gives a young lab to test an early idea that more traditional funders may have passed over. Before larger grants arrive and results are published, what matters most is simply giving discovery a chance.