Jab to beat sunburn and skin cancer

A simple injection has been developed to beat sunburn - and it could slash the risk of skin cancer.

It does away with the need for sunblocks and has already been successfully tested on mice.

"The injected mice could withstand higher doses of UV light without developing sunburn, and also had higher resistance to UVinduced skin cancer," said Dr Bert Van Der Horst at Erasmus University Medical Centre in Rotterdam, who developed the injections. "This suggests that this compound could be used as a genetic tool to fight UV-induced skin cancer in humans."

Researchers made the mice sun-resistant by adding an enzyme missing from most mammals. This caused their skin to develop the ability to repair damage from UV rays. Without the enzyme, excessive exposure to the sun causes cells on the skin to die - sunburn. On occasion, this can cause DNA in the skin to mutate and leads to skin cancer.

There are 65,000 new cases of skin cancer in Britain every year and about 2,000 deaths from the disease.