Naked mole-rat may hold the clue to beating cancer | Hacker News Reader

Naked mole-rat may hold the clue to beating cancer

metro.co.uk

16 pointsimdsm19 comments

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metro.co.uk is the web site of a free commuter newspaper handled out in some cities in the UK. It probably wouldn't be my first choice for science news.

Dr Seluanov's bio [1] links to a number of papers, most of which appear to be cancer-related. There is a pubmed abstract and full text available for "Hypersensitivity to contact inhibition provides a clue to cancer resistance of naked mole-rat." [2].

Also the NYT has an article [3].

[1] http://www.rochester.edu/College/BIO/professors/seluanov

[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19858485

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/19/science/a-homely-rodent-ma...

As usual, Ed Yong has a good overview on NERS: http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/06/19/why-naked...

edit: I see the NYT article is by Carl Zimmer, so I can only recommend though I've yet to read it.

Although

> Hyaluronan probably isn’t the only way to fight off cancer. Blind mole rats (which, despite their name, are not close relatives of naked mole rats) rarely get cancer either. But the research Dr. Gorbunova and Dr. Seluanov have conducted on those rodents suggests that they fight cancer by sending a different signal to fast-growing cells, causing them to commit suicide.

Dan Engber's wonderful 2011 Slate piece[0], linked by Yong, notes naked mole rats have perfectly functioning apoptosis processes:

> A naked mole rat cell, they argued, is hypersensitive to crowds: The minute one of its cytoplasmic arms brushes up against a stranger, it stops dividing. A cell could be induced to overcome its shyness with the help of some cancer-causing proteins, and so emboldened it would grow out of control, like a tumor. But even then, a second line of defense would be activated: The cell would apoptose, or self-destruct.

it's not clear whether Zimmer is talking about somehow extra-active apoptosis in blind mole rats, does anybody have precisions?

[0] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_mouse_t...

Blind mole rats live in the deserts of Africa, as burrowers, never expose themselves to the sun.

They live unique lives, exactly like mammalian termites, with a queen mother and a lot of pheromones. Most animals never have sex, produce milk or get pregnant in its entire life.

This animals starve, CAN adapt its body temperature to the temperature of it surroundings (i.e like reptiles do), have a slow metabolism, low respiratory rates...

And live in a clean environment free from chemicals... How much plastics, cancerous substances and pesticides can you find in a desert of Africa?... not much, I guess.

So... big surprise... they live much longer lives that rats and its tumorous cells are as lazy growing as the rest of its metabolism

The clue to beat cancer revealed by mole rats!:

Don't expose yourself to all that causes cancer, like hight metabolism rates, cancerous substances, sun rays, sexually transmitted viruses...

In the article they mention:

Experiments show that when HMW-HA is removed from the creature’s cells, they become susceptible to cancer, suggesting it plays a role in making the rodent ‘cancer-proof’.

And this is a good point, but I wish to add some crazy ideas

Maybe the absence of HMW-HA is boosting the metabolism in this rodents? what if those animals living in low oxigen habitats could exchange more or less oxigen by its skins HMW-HA mediated? more oxigen, more metabolic rates, more sun exposition in captive animals... cancer appears?.

Just wild speculation about a very interesting discovery; I'm not saying that this is the role of HMW-HA, I will be really very happy with the idea of a safer replacement for chemotherapy, but I wish to read studies about other possible reasons for the development of a cancer-proof system in an animal living in an apparently "not cancer prone" environment. And I'd like a lot also to have data about cancer rates in queens/kings and the other animals. There are different rates?, the same probability of having cancer in both groups?

> CAN adapt its body temperature to the temperature of it surroundings (i.e like reptiles do)

THat's pretty much the opposite of adapting, they fail to regulate body heat (as reptiles do) and are thus at the mercy of environmental heat.

could we stop with the "we may have found something that will cure cancer / aids vaccine / cure alzeimer " news ? i know, we're scientists, we're supposed to believe in scientifical progress. But after hearing those kind of news for the last twenty years, i feel like we should start speaking about cures only once at leat one human beeing was cured...

Well, bad journalism is more common than good journalism. Tom Scott proposed for many newspaper articles to have warning labels. In this case, the label would read: ‘WARNING: Journalist does not understand the subject they are writing about.’

http://www.tomscott.com/warnings/

A good start would be to source from science journos instead of trash like metro or the daily mail.

Surprised to hear that they can live for 30 years. Must be the tuberous diet!

See also:

http://www.nature.com/news/simple-molecule-prevents-mole-rat...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-22961694

http://www.damninteresting.com/the-mole-rat-prophecies/

These factors mean the mortality of naked mole rats does not appear to increase with age, allowing them to evolve genes for longevity, Prof Buffenstein told the BBC.

Does that mean that they can live forever barring physical trauma?

I think that's true for some jellyfish and lobsters too

For lobsters, that's still a matter for debate. See [1] and [2].

Some animals just do live a long time though. A clam believed to be 405 years old was found in waters off Iceland in 2007 [3]. I'm not a marine biologist, but I suspect that an absence of predators may be relevant.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobster#Longevity

[2] http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8520/under-the-r...

[3] http://phys.org/news112870855.html

> Does that mean that they can live forever barring physical trauma?

Doesn't seem to be the case, they have a very long (for rodents — it is the longest-lived rodent known — and even more so at their size: they're between mice and rats and live 3 times as long as capybaras) lifespan and significant aging seems to occur only at the very end of that lifespan, but they're not immortal as they also die in lab settings.

Unfortunately, http://www.xkcd.com/1217/ comes to mind...

Doesn't apply here since it's observed in-vivo and hyaluronan had already been linked to cancer:

> In the early days of hyaluronan research, scientists were confused by the fact that the molecule seemed to both prevent and cause cancer (the Daily Mail would have loved it).

> Since then, we’ve discovered that the sugar’s size is responsible for its dual nature. Bryan Toole from the Medical University of South Carolina, who studies hyaluronan, says that high concentrations of the large versions can stop cells from turning cancerous, while smaller versions can actually promote cancer. In a similar way, the large forms tamp down inflammation while the small ones exacerbate it, which may relevant to cancer since inflammation is tied to several tumours.

finally, as far as I understand long hyaluronan doesn't kill cancer, it prevents cancerous growth.

I wonder if anyone bottles this compound they'd be able to sell it in china given the cultural health interest in animal parts there.

You have to inject it since it's part of the extracellular matrix. And the compound (Hyaluronan) is naturally synthesized by your body (or you'd be dead), it seems the anti-cancer properties of naked mole rat hyaluronan comes from it being much longer than it usually is in humans (the formula is (C14H21NO11)n).

IIRC hyaluronan is already used in cosmetics/skin care to "fill out" wrinkles or lips.

Images might be NSFW.

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