The special gene that protects elephants against cancer
There are about a million different reasons to love elephants – and one of them is that they could hold the key to a more successful fight against cancer. Elephants rarely get cancer because they have special genes that fight it – and a new study has revealed more about how that works.
In general, the larger an animal, the higher you’d think its cancer risk would be – there are more cells to mutate, plus larger animals tend to live longer and the risk of mutation increases with age. However, in a phenomenon known as Peto’s paradox, larger species of animal don’t appear to be more prone to cancer than smaller species, and it’s believed that some larger species have developed specific ways of preventing cancer. As the world’s largest land mammals, elephants have about 100 times as many potentially cancerous cells as humans – yet in 2015, the NHS reported that while one in five humans die of cancer, just 1 in 20 elephants do so.
That year, researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of Utah discovered that whereas humans had one copy of an anti-cancer gene known as p53, elephants had 20 copies. p53 makes a protein that senses when cell DNA has been damaged and, if the harm is too major to be fixed, switches on other genes which will kill the damaged cells and stop them being a cancer risk. So, elephants are 20 times better at detecting damaged DNA than we are.
Now, researchers have identified a second gene which also helps protect against cancer. And this gene – called leukemia inhibitory factor 6 – has so far only been found in elephants.
The researchers think that LIF6 is actually a former pseudogene – a bit of DNA that was once a complete gene but lost some of its functions – and has been part of elephants’ genetic makeup for around 59 million years, not doing much for most of that time. But it seems to have been brought back into usefulness and is now one of the genes activated by p53 to kill cells with damaged DNA.
However, according to study author Vincent Lynch, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, there’s almost certainly still much more to discover. “LIF6 is playing a small part in a broader process,” he said.
If your work involves medical research, you could be eligible for money from the government to help you pursue your valuable projects through research and development tax credits. You might be able to get as much as a quarter of your costs back through the R&D tax incentive if your work is advancing science and technology or improving knowledge in your field. And you don’t have to spend your precious time and resources sorting out your claim – at R&D Tax Solutions, we’re R&D tax specialists so can do all the legwork and form-filling for you. Have a look at our UK R&D tax credit calculator to see if you could be eligible.
