The inner world of the digger

The resistance of naked diggers to cancer depends on the internal environment of the body

Maria Krivochenko, Naked Science

Naked diggers are animals living in East Africa, with a complex colony organization and a unique structure. These are the only cold-blooded mammals that do not age and live more than 30 years, which is a lot for rodents (mice of the same size live 10 times less). In addition, they are not afraid of thermal and chemical burns, survive at very low oxygen levels and do not die from cancer.

Researchers are studying diggers to find a way to resist the aging process and cancer. "All our work with diggers — the study of their hypoxia, resistance to pain and resistance to cancer — seeks to use the structural features of this species to better understand how our organs work," he said Dr. Evan St. John Smith, one of the senior authors of the study.

Until now, it was believed that carcinoma does not occur in these rodents because their healthy cells are resistant to becoming cancerous. But researchers from the University of Cambridge have found that genes that cause tumors in other animals can also harm diggers, but their body does not allow cancer cells to multiply. The results of the work, published in the journal Nature (Hadi et al., Transformation of naked mole-rat cells), will help scientists understand how the disease develops in the early stages in humans and find new ways to prevent and treat it.

The team studied 79 tissue samples obtained from the intestines, pancreas, skin, lungs and kidneys of rodents, and then injected cancer-causing genes into them. Scientists did not expect that they would be able to turn the cells of naked diggers into cancerous ones. Fazal Hadi, lead researcher of the study, a fellow at the Cambridge Cancer Research Center in the UK, said: "To our surprise, infected animal cells began to multiply and quickly form colonies. Because of the accelerated growth, we realized that they had become cancerous."

Then they injected infected tissues into mice, and those began to develop tumors. The experiment shows that cancer at an early stage is stopped by a special environment that forms the body of the digger. This contradicts the results of old studies that claimed that mechanisms inside healthy cells are responsible for the resistance of these animals to the disease.

Now scientists want to understand how rodents stop the division of cancer cells inside the tumor. Of particular interest is the unique immune system, which can destroy potentially precancerous cells. Dr. Walid Khaled, one of the senior authors of the study, from the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Cambridge, said: "The results were a surprise to us and completely changed our understanding of cancer resistance in diggers. If we can understand what is special about the immune system of these animals and how it protects them, we can develop measures to prevent this disease in humans."

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