THEY might be bald and ugly, but naked mole rats never get cancer. If their trick can be copied it could help humans resist cancer too.
It’s almost impossible to culture naked mole rat cells in the lab, which made Andrei Seluanov and Vera Gorbunova from Rochester University, New York, wonder if this might be linked to their ability to resist cancer.
They found that a dilute solution of naked mole rat skin cells did start to proliferate, but stopped once the cells reached a certain, relatively low density. Such “contact inhibition” is also used by human cells to inhibit growth, but cancer bypasses this mechanism so cells keep growing.
The researchers also found that contact inhibition in naked mole rats is controlled by two genes, p16 and p27, while in humans it is primarily controlled by p27. “Naked mole rats have an additional barrier in the way of tumour progression,” says Seluanov, who presented the results at the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence meeting in Cambridge, UK, last week.
If this check could be stimulated in humans, it could halt the growth of cancerous tumours.