Melanoma is the most deadly form of skin cancer, and incidence continues to rise rapidly each year. In the UK, 2000 people die prematurely each year from melanoma, and once melanoma has spread there are no current treatments that successfully can be used to treat the disease. One of the ways in which melanoma can develop is from moles and we have developed a mole-to-melanoma model of cancer progression based on the most frequently mutated human gene in melanoma using the vertebrate animal called zebrafish. The way cancer develops and looks in zebrafish is highly similar to human cancers, and the genetic pathways that are altered in zebrafish cancers are the same as in people. The advantage for us with this system is that we can quickly and easily explore the function of many genes in melanoma development, as well as environmental factors that may contribute to disease. We can also test thousands of new and known chemicals in the zebrafish system that may be relevant to melanoma growth and movement in the body. Finally, the same genes that promote melanoma can also cause a syndrome called cardio-facial-cutaneous (CFC) syndrome, and we are developing new ways to look how the knowledge we gain from our melanoma studies may in fact be directly relevant to how we approach treatment for CFC.