Can elephants help halt the spread of cancer?

And when DNA-damaging agents were introduced to elephants’ blood and humans’ blood, the elephants’ cells more quickly experienced “cell death” – possibly why elephants develop less cancer than humans, Schiffman said in a news release from Primary Children’s Hospital.

Scientists have unravelled the secret to why elephants rarely get cancer despite their large size.

Now a team at the University of Chicago has found that elephants carry 20 copies of a tumour-suppressing gene called TP53. Compared with human cells, elephant cells demonstrated increased apoptotic response following DNA damage.

Schiffman said, “This may be more effective of an approach to cancer prevention than trying to stop a mutated cell from dividing and not being able to completely fix itself”.

A subsequent analysis of the entire elephant genome placed particular focus on the so-called P53 gene, a known tumor suppressor tasked with preventing cancer by fixing damaged cells and/or killing them when fix isn’t possible.

Most humans have two copies of the P53 gene in each cell.

Schiffman hopes that his study would lead to improved cancer treatments, particularly with children born with Li-Fraumeni syndrome, a rare condition in which they have only one functional TPS3.

Schiffman and co-authors, Lisa Abegglen, Ashley Chan, Kristy Lee, Rosann Robinson, Michael Campbell, and Srividya Bhaskara are from Huntsman Cancer Institute and the University of Utah, Aleah Caulin and Shane Jensen are from the University of Pennsylvania, Wendy Kiso and Dennis Schmitt are from the Ringling Bros.

“So the elephants, we think, because of these extra copies of these protection genes, what they do is they’re on the lookout”, Schiffman said. The researchers compared the radiated cells from elephants, healthy humans and people with Li-Fraumeni Syndrome and found that elephant cells self-destruct at double the rate of human cells and five times the rate of Li-Fraumeni cells. One such plan is to investigate natural or synthetic compounds that can mimic the amplification of the p53-associated gene seen in elephants.

The mystery of why that’s so launched an investigation three years ago by a team of Utah scientists.

The current findings appear in the October. 8 online edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The experiment showed that elephant cells have a much faster self-destruction rate when it is exposed to radiations or carcinogens.

He believes that further research on elephants, and other animals that tend to ward off cancer, “may indeed provide a few clues as to how we might better harness p53-regulated cellular pathways in humans”.

Schiffman said the researchers subjected elephant blood to the kind of stresses that sometimes lead to cancer.

So where do elephants come in? They have just one active copy of p53 and more than a 90 percent lifetime risk for cancer.

British expert Professor Mel Greaves, director of the Centre for Evolution and Cancer at London’s Institute of Cancer Research, who co-authored an editorial on the research in the journal, said: “It is not immediately clear what lessons there are from this elephant tale for risk of cancer in humans”. For instance, Schiffman says there might be drugs that already exist or we don’t know about yet that can do that.

“In contrast”, he added, “an elephant’s size is so large, and elephants reproduce throughout most of their lifespan of over 50 years old”. “Its job is to fly around our cells and make sure that we don’t get cancer”.

Genome studies in other large animals have uncovered different adaptations that could help keep cancer at bay.

This finding is now prompting new studies to analyze ways to treat cancer based on p53.