Elephants have only 5% risk of getting cancer as compared to 15 to 25% in humans. SDeeing Elephants he started to wonder why Elephants who have more blood in their body and hence logically must have more cancer. This problem even has a name – Peto’s paradox.
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A number of scientists have speculated that large, long-lived animals must evolve extra cancer-fighting weapons. This gene is quite vital as it has the ability to create a protein that suppresses tumors. In comparison, humans have only two copies of such genes.
Dr. Joshua Schiffman, a paediatric oncologist and research investigator at the Huntsman Cancer Institute, was often puzzled by the fact that large animals like Elephant and Whales have considerably less incidence of cancer as compared to smaller animals.
Humans inherit one allele of TP53 from each of their parents, and both of them must be functional to fight off cancer. Schiffman’s patients include children with incomplete p53 genes because of a condition called Li-Fraumeni syndrome, which greatly increases their chances of developing cancer.
“They should be 100 times more likely to have a cell slip into a cancerous state and trigger the disease over their long life span of 50 to 70 years”, scientists at the University of Utah said in a new study.
While the research won’t lead to any immediate treatment for humans, progress against cancer can come “from unexpected directions”, said Dr. Ted Gansler of the American Cancer Society.
“A light bulb went off in my head, ” Schiffman said. The circus also contributed $250,000 to fund the research. Cancer isn’t discovered elephants however they have actually more nuerons when compared to a soul.
Data from the Elephant Encyclopaedia was also collected to analyse the cause of death in African and Asian elephants.
Next, they took a closer look at the African elephant genome and tallied 20 copies of TP53. Out of 20 copies of TP53, researchers found one copy was original and remaining 19 were retrogenes that found their way into the genome over time.
During the study, scientists extracted white blood cells from elephants and damaged the cells’ DNA, which can cause cancer. It detects damage or stress in the cell, and stops it from dividing until the DNA is repaired or the stress has passed.
While this may sound like a bad thing, it isn’t.
Did you know that elephants rarely get cancer? “It makes tremendous sense – the best way to prevent cancer in a cell is to eliminate it entirely”.
“Elephants may have a more robust mechanism for killing damaged cells that are at risk for becoming cancerous”, the study said.
The results suggest extra p53 could explain elephants’ enhanced resistance to cancer.
Trevor Graham, who studies tumour biology at the Barts Cancer Institute at Queen Mary University of London, said the findings are exciting. If p53 develops a fault it can leave people at the mercy of cancer.
This team inserted elephants’ p53 genes into mouse cells and found that those cells behaved just like elephants and self-destructed when exposed to DNA-damaging drugs, said co-author Vincent Lynch, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago.
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“Evolution has had 55 million years to figure this out, ” he said.
