Resistant to cancer cells, insensitive to pain, capable of surviving without oxygen… The naked mole rat multiplies the extraordinary characteristics that make it a subject of unlimited research. On the occasion of All Saints’ Day, Why Doctor takes stock of immortality…
The star of laboratories working on ageing! A rat with an ugly name: the mole rat, like the animal, naked as “naked as a worm.” He never stops revealing his secrets… You can’t even say he’s handsome; even rather ugly, but it doesn’t matter, when you know that this rodent of 8 centimeters for 35 grams on average lives perfectly well until thirty years.
400 years of life expectancy
Thirty years, nothing too extraordinary, because humans live on average much longer, except that compared to the average life of rats, 30 years is the equivalent of almost 400 years for us. And this is where the performance becomes remarkable…
It is therefore very interesting to unravel the secret of this very special youth, because this rat, in addition to living very, very old, also lives without disease… In fact, he dies very slowly; this is called dying of old age.
One could estimate that he lives very old because he is never, or almost never, sick – except for the usual illnesses of other rats; but it is in the intimate mechanism of the multiplication of its cells that researchers have tried to understand. It is oncologists who provide the first elements of the answer. In fact, studies on the naked mole rat had proven that this rodent was quite resistant to tumor formation. No trace of cancer was found in the entire species.
Rats that secrete an anti-cancer drug
Researchers at the University of Rochester in the United States, who have tried to understand why this small rodent is much more resistant to cancer than its laboratory counterparts, mice, think they have unlocked the secret of its longevity: you know that a explanations for the occurrence of cancers is that our aging cells begin to go crazy and secrete deteriorated products. Well, this rat’s proteins are 40% less likely to contain genetic errors and produce diseased cells. This is the secret of its longevity.
This means that these rats somehow secrete their own anti-cancer drug, their own treatment, and these same researchers published a study in the British journal Nature. They demonstrated that an acid present in the naked mole-rat prevented cancer cells from clumping together and therefore forming tumours…
What can we conclude from this?
Those who think that rats will replace humans on the surface of this planet may not be entirely wrong…
More practically, that this rodent can therefore teach us a lot about the fight against the transformations of tumors in humans, and particularly, offers a serious lead against the formation of cancerous cells. Because we have identified the anti-cancer produced by this animal; it’s called hyaluronic acid, a substance that people who have osteoarthritis know well since they are regularly injected into the knee…
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