Dr Veronique Bataille trained at the Louvain Medical School in Brussels and graduated in July 1985 with magnum cum laude. She then moved to London and worked in many teaching hospitals in London. She started her dermatology training at St John’s Institute of Dermatology at St Thomas Hospital in 1989. She then moved to the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in Holborn and the Royal London Hospital as a clinical research fellow where she completed her PhD on the genetic epidemiology of skin and eye melanoma in 1995 under the supervision of Professors Julia Newton Bishop, Jack Cuzick and Tim Bishop.

In 1993, Dr Bataille had the opportunity to spend several months in the Sydney Melanoma Unit in Australia, one of the busiest melanoma unit in the world. In 1994, she moved to St George’s Hospital in London where she spent 2 years as a Senior Registrar also working in the Pigmented Lesion Clinic and Melanoma Clinic.

Dr Bataille became an accredited consultant dermatologist in 1996 and is on the specialist registry for dermatology of the UK General Medical Council. In 1996, she was appointed Senior Lecturer and Honorary Consultant Dermatologist at Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry where she continued her interest in the genetics of melanoma and other skin cancers. At Barts and the London Hospital, she was the lead clinician for the provision of clinical services in melanoma. She has also supervised research fellows, research nurses and lab technicians on various projects on skin cancers. Dr Bataille also has an academic attachment with Kings College, London since 1996. Dr Bataille is still working at the West Hertfordshire NHS Trust where she gives her expertise in the diagnosis and triage of skin lesions. She also worked for many years with Professor Paul Nathan in the melanoma oncology clinic for stage 3 and 4 patients.

Over the last 20 years, Dr Bataille has also set up many projects at the Twin Research Unit at St Thomas Hospital in London ( Kings College, London), where she has studied the genetic influence on common skin disorders such as acne, eczema, psoriasis and moles/melanoma in more than 3000 twins. She has been trained in many aspects of medical statistics using the Stata and the Mx software. She is still supervising PhD theses at Kings College, London.

Dr Bataille has published extensively in many dermatology, genetic and cancer journals over the last 20 years and has presented many abstracts at national and international meetings. She regularly writes reviews and book chapters on skin cancer and reviews manuscripts for many dermatology journals. She also sub-editor for international dermatology and cancer journals and review up to 4 manuscripts month.

Since 1996 Dr Bataille has acted as a consultant and advisor for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Between 2003 and 2013, Dr Bataille was the UK dermatology consultant for L’Oreal Paris.

What has been the highlight of my research career?

“I have been privileged as my research has always been very closely connected to my clinical work. I have been running clinics for families at high risk of melanoma for more than 20 years and, by following these families, I noticed that they seem to age well with sustained plump skin, very few wrinkles and few sun spots over the years. I therefore decided to look into this further. I was very again fortunate to have worked at the Twin Research Unit at St Thomas Hospital (twinsuk.ac.uk) which was set up in 1995. We looked at ageing in twins with many moles compared those with very few. We confirmed that individuals with a lot of moles appear to have a slower pace of ageing as their telomeres (bits of chromosomes which can be measured and is reliable to look at the ageing process) were longer in those with many moles compared to those with very few. At that time in 2007, nobody had looked at the connection between melanoma and ageing/telomeres. Now since 2010, many publications have followed suit and are all confirming these results which still show that of many cancers, melanoma is the most strongly associated with longer telomeres and mutations in telomere genes.

I have been a co-principal investigator on the role of the gut microbiome and diet in responses to immunotherapy in patients with advanced melanoma. This is part of a very large international Consortium funded by the Seerave Foundation (www.seerave.org). We are very grateful for all the stool samples melanoma patients have donated for this very important research. More than 600 stool and 300 blood samples have been analysed and many publications in high impact medical journals have been published. These studies have shown that diet is very important to enhance responses to immunotherapy in stage 3 and 4 melanoma and that the composition of the gut microbiome when one starts the treatment is a key predictor of responses.

I was also very busy during the pandemic looking at the skin manifestations of COVID with the help of the COVID Symptoms app run by Professor Tim Spector from the company Zoe (www.zoe.com). This work has led to an important manuscript in the British Journal of Dermatology and the creation of a library of Covid skin manifestations which was valuable for clinicians around the world.

More recently, I have been interested to look at ways of offering skin cancer screening which is more easily accessible considering the long waiting lists in the NHS but also privately in London. Hence, I have co-founded the company SkinTell (https://www.skintell.co.uk) where the mole mapping screening takes place in W1 in Mayfair. This came about via a collaboration with Matt Roberts, a well known trainer and wellness expert.