The Lynch Lab is based in St John's Institute of Dermatology at King's College London, on the Guy's Campus. We are motivated by two of the key challenges in dermatological surgery: preventing skin cancer and minimising scarring. To understand how fibroblasts and keratinocytes interact, we combine single-cell genomics, spatial transcriptomics, non-invasive skin imaging, AI and 3-dimensional organotypic cell culture models.
Our approach is translational: clinical problem → mechanistic insight → therapeutic strategy → IP → clinical trial or industry partnership.
Skin cancer is the most common cancer in humans, and many patients face a lifelong cycle of new tumours. We ask:
Scars follow trauma, surgery and inflammation such as acne. We want to understand how skin heals, and how to make it heal better:
We use AI to diagnose skin cancer and inflammatory skin conditions from clinical images and from non-invasive microscopy, such as dermoscopy and optical coherence tomography. We ask:
Research software and write-ups you can try for yourself.
A research AI model that runs entirely in your web browser. Upload a dermoscopic or clinical image, or try sample lesions the model has never seen, and compare its answer with the biopsy result.
Open the classifier →GPT-6 Astra, Claude Fable 5.1 and a fine-tuned Inception v3 on 200 biopsied lesions: who names the diagnosis, and who sends melanomas home.
Read the article →We translate our research from bench to bedside through commercial collaborations and spin-out companies.
Dr Lynch is a co-inventor on two patents covering the sorting and therapeutic use of human dermal fibroblast subpopulations. They form the core IP of Fibrodyne, a King's College London spin-out co-founded with Professor Fiona Watt, which secured £2M in seed investment to develop cell-based therapies for scars.
Epistat Therapeutics is a King's College London spinout, founded on the lab's skin cancer prevention research, developing the first preventive medicines for squamous and basal cell skin cancer for high-risk patients.
Honorary Reader, King’s College London - Consultant Dermatologist & Dermatological Surgeon, St John’s Institute of Dermatology
Dr Lynch is an Honorary Reader at King’s College London and a fellowship-trained Mohs surgeon and clinician-scientist whose work spans skin cancer prevention, non-invasive diagnostics, fibroblast biology, and regenerative dermatology.
Project: Jeyrroy uses fibroblast–keratinocyte spheroid co-cultures and spatial transcriptomics to identify pathways that drive tumour-associated phenotypes in BCC and cSCC, aiming to develop risk-reducing therapies.
Luis is interested in understanding pathways that prevent the development of cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (cSCC) and is currently applying for funding to pursue a research fellowship.
Selected highlights from the lab's work, with the full list below.
A senior-author paper giving a multiscale spatial atlas of healthy skin and the basal cell carcinoma microenvironment, which directly informs the lab's cancer prevention work.
Part of the Human Cell Atlas: the cell types of healthy skin, eczema and psoriasis, a foundation for our work across anatomical sites and in skin cancer.
The first study to show that simple changes in colour balance and rotation can dramatically change the accuracy of deep learning models for skin cancer diagnosis.
A detailed census of fibroblast heterogeneity in human skin, identifying functionally distinct subpopulations.
Sun-exposed, non-cancerous skin carries a high burden of expanded mutant clones, and spatial constraints govern how they compete.
We welcome applications from PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, clinician-scientists, research assistants, computational biologists, and engineers.
We offer:
To enquire about positions, please send a CV and brief summary of your interests via the contact information below.
