Blind Mole Rats Use Junk DNA to Combat Cancer

Amazing stuff! Cancer is history!

"... The paper describes an important new mechanistic insight into the way one can trigger inflammatory signals in cancer cells to either kill them directly or make them vulnerable to cancer-killing therapies ...
animal’s natural resistance to cancer, mediated by the widespread initiation of cell death among rapidly proliferating precancerous cells. The cell death is triggered by increased production of the inflammatory cytokine interferon beta (IFN-β), but what causes IFN-β to ramp-up was unknown. ...
showed that in cultured human cancer cells, artificially lowering the level of the human DNA methyltransferase DNMT1 or boosting the level of retrotransposons by transfecting in retrotransposon genes could curtail proliferation. This suggests that even though humans have not evolved the same cancer resistance mechanism as blind mole rats, our related cellular machinery could potentially be tweaked to treat cancers ..."

From the abstract:

"Blind mole rats (BMRs) are small rodents, characterized by an exceptionally long lifespan (>21 years) and resistance to both spontaneous and induced tumorigenesis. Here we report that cancer resistance in the BMR is mediated by retrotransposable elements (RTEs). Cells and tissues of BMRs express very low levels of DNA methyltransferase. Following cell hyperplasia, the BMR genome DNA loses methylation, resulting in the activation of RTEs. Upregulated RTEs form cytoplasmic RNA–DNA hybrids, which activate the cGAS–STING pathway to induce cell death. Although this mechanism is enhanced in the BMR, we show that it functions in mice and humans. We propose that RTEs were co-opted to serve as tumor suppressors that monitor cell proliferation and are activated in premalignant cells to trigger cell death via activation of the innate immune response. Activation of RTEs is a double-edged sword, serving as a tumor suppressor but contributing to aging in late life via the induction of sterile inflammation."

Blind Mole Rats Use Junk DNA to Combat Cancer | The Scientist Magazine® Activation of retrotransposons in the animals’ cancerous cells sets off an innate immune response that triggers cell death.

Transposon-triggered innate immune response confers cancer resistance to the blind mole rat