Cancer rates among elephants have long intrigued scientists given the fact that they have 100 times more body cells than an average person.
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And yet, the analysis of a large database of elephant deaths showed that less than 5% of elephants die of cancer, compared to 11 to 25% in people. What they expected was that elephant’s cells would restore more rapidly than the human cells. That gives a considerable measure of cells a great deal of opportunities to change and get to be harmful through the span of a pachyderm’s lifetime.
The question of why big animals don’t get more cancer than small ones is a long-standing mystery, one that scientists call “Peto’s Paradox”.
Presently, new research has revealed the key to our enormous eared companions’ tumor battling ability.
Humans typically have just two copies of a tumor-blocking gene called TP53, inheriting one from their mother and one from their father, said Joshua Schiffman, co-author of the study published Thursday in JAMA.
Logically, elephants should be developing cancers at 100 times the rate humans do. It detects stress or damage in the cell, and stops the cell from dividing until the stress has passed or the DNA is repaired. Although researchers often breed mice that lack working copies of certain genes, “that’s not going to happen” with elephants, he said.
“Nature has already figured out how to prevent cancer”. It’s a discovery that could lead to new ways to protect people from the disease, researchers say.
“We learned at a conference several years ago that elephants have many, many copies of this cancer protection gene”. However, experts stated that the focus must be on the “absurd” and “ridiculous” things humans keep on doing for increasing cancer risk. Feld Entertainment’s productions have appeared in more than 75 countries and on six continents to date and include Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey, Monster Jam, Monster Energy Supercross, AMSOIL Arenacross, Disney On Ice Presented by Stonyfield YoKids Organic Yogurt, Disney Live!
His team – as well as a second group of scientists – pinned down the size of the elephants’ surplus – 20 copies. One of them was the original, and the other 19 were retrogenes that found their way into the genome over time.
Schiffman and his team do know how they plan to apply the findings to humans. They are at risk of becoming extinct over the next ten years as a result of cancer-spreading parasites. But that’s not what they observed. Instead, the elephant cells were twice as likely to die after radiation exposure than were human cells.
The Times wrote that University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Vincent J. Lynch and a team of researchers came up with the same conclusion about TP53 in a draft paper posted on bioRxiv. “It makes tremendous sense – the best way to prevent cancer in a cell is to eliminate entirely”.
The researchers found that elephants produce extra copies of the p53 protein, and that elephant blood cells seem exquisitely sensitive to DNA damage from ionizing radiation.
The myth that sharks don’t get cancer has encouraged people to kill them and sell their cartilage for nutritional supplements.
Over 16,000 new patients of cancer are diagnosed yearly in the United States; whereas during their whole life, elephants have no cancer.
Human cells carry just two copies of P53.
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Could a cure for cancer be hiding in the elephant’s genetic code?
