Cancer in elephants is very rare, and in order to understand just how they are protected from the disease despite their size and long lifespan, a team including ACE researchers studied their TP-53 genes. Their results appeared in Nature, Cell Death Discovery in February 2023. TP-53 is the gene that causes damaged cells to die by apoptosis. Elephant have approximately 20 TP-53 genes, as opposed to 1 in humans, and these extra copies in elephants are thought to protect the elephants from cancer. But 19 of the elephants’ TP-53 genes are retrogenes and don’t fully work in the same was as regular TP-53. To explore their mode of action, the researchers selected one variety of the retrogenes and explored its potential to kill human cancer cells since suitable elephant cells weren’t available. The results showed for the first time, that the p53 retrogene elephant protein induces apoptosis in human cancer cells. As the research state in their paper, “Understanding the molecular mechanism by which the additional elephant TP53 retrogenes function may provide evolutionary insight that can be utilized for the development of therapeutics to treat human cancers.”
