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Published On January 28, 2015
BASIC RESEARCH
Of Elephants and Evolution
Animals may hold a key to cancer’s origins and treatment.
Cancer can occur in most animals, large or small. Therein lies an evolutionary conundrum: If all cells have a roughly equal chance of acquiring cancer-causing mutations, then big animals—which have more cells—should have a higher risk for developing malignancies. But that’s not the case. About one in four Americans will die of cancer, yet no more than one in 20 elephants suffers the same fate. Meanwhile, dogs are more than two and a half times more likely to develop cancer than humans are.
Learning how different species evolved to be more or less vulnerable to cancer might lead to new strategies for preventing and treating the disease. University of Utah pediatric oncologist Joshua Schiffman became intrigued by this possibility after his dog Rhody died. The Bernese mountain dog suffered from histiocytic sarcoma, an aggressive cancer that afflicts about one in four members of this breed. In collaboration with North Carolina State professor of genomics Matthew Breen, Schiffman is comparing the genomes of dogs diagnosed with cancer with genetic data from human cancer patients in hopes of identifying markers that could lead to early diagnosis of diseases such as glioblastoma, an often-fatal brain malignancy.
On the other end of the size scale, Schiffman is studying elephant blood obtained from Utah’s Hogle Zoo and Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, in hopes of identifying mechanisms that minimize the pachyderm’s cancer risk.
Dispatches

What Makes a Kid Clumsy? More research into coordination disorders shows why some children are more prone to trip, fumble and spill the milk.

Eyes in the Sky Satellite data can be used to assess the health impact of dust storms and the spread of mosquito-borne diseases. Additional applications could be on the horizon.

Could This One Change Help Curb the Opioid Crisis? To prescribe an effective bridge to addiction treatment, emergency physicians must get special training and receive a waiver. Making that process easier—or eliminating the requirement altogether—could make a big impact.

One Thing Leads to the Next Robert Lefkowitz is best known for revealing the mechanism behind hundreds of drugs in use today. But he thinks of himself as a storyteller first and has a new book out to make his case.

Podcast: The Research Year That Was Medical research labs have faced a difficult stretch of closed buildings and competing priorities. Yet they have also produced milestone discoveries—and not only on COVID-19.

The Shape of Us Two milestone discoveries in protein modeling promise to change the fundamentals of drug discovery.

Universal Flu Vaccines Move Forward In the shadow of coronavirus vaccine development, another vaccine was making solid progress.

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