Good news! Amazing stuff! Cancer is history (soon)!
It appears in humans transmissible cancers are rare (according to Google search)
This new research also confirms that overeating can be a cause of cancer.
"Transmissible cancers are an evolutionary enigma, defying just about every expectation scientists have for how cancers should behave. How do these bizarre tumors arise, gain the ability to spread, and persist, sometimes for millennia? Scientists may finally be poised to answer such questions, as for the first time, researchers report the spontaneous generation of transmissible tumors in the lab in small freshwater cnidarians called hydras.
Hydras are perhaps best known for their ‘immortality’: Individuals kept well seem to live indefinitely without showing any signs of aging and can even regenerate damaged parts. But they’re also cancer-prone, researchers studying the animals realized about 15 years ago. Wild hydras readily develop cancer when fed too much in captivity—no genetic manipulation required—which makes them an excellent choice for studying how cancers arise ... carefully observed the clonal descendants of hydras that developed tumors after being overfed, “hoping to capture the emergence of a transmissible tumor firsthand.” ...
By allowing researchers to observe how transmissible tumors behave and evolve under different conditions, the system aims to provide insights into how these contagious cancers develop, evolve, and spread—and, hopefully, such intel will help scientists better predict and control outbreaks of these cancers in wildlife."
"... Transmissible cancers are considered rare; scientists have spotted only about a dozen examples, mostly in mussels and their relatives. But their “dramatic ecological consequences” make them important to study ..."
From the abstract:
"While most cancers are not transmissible, there are rare cases where cancer cells can spread between individuals and even across species, leading to epidemics. Despite their significance, the origins of such cancers remain elusive due to late detection in host populations. Using Hydra oligactis, which exhibits spontaneous tumour development that in some strains became vertically transmitted, this study presents the first experimental observation of the evolution of a transmissible tumour. Specifically, we assessed the initial vertical transmission rate of spontaneous tumours and explored the potential for optimizing this rate through artificial selection. One of the hydra strains, which evolved transmissible tumours over five generations, was characterized by analysis of cell type and bacteriome, and assessment of life-history traits. Our findings indicate that tumour transmission can be immediate for some strains and can be enhanced by selection. The resulting tumours are characterized by overproliferation of large interstitial stem cells and are not associated with a specific bacteriome. Furthermore, despite only five generations of transmission, these tumours induced notable alterations in host life-history traits, hinting at a compensatory response. This work, therefore, makes the first contribution to understanding the conditions of transmissible cancer emergence and their short-term consequences for the host."
De novo evolution of transmissible tumours in hydra (open access)
Figure 4. Summary of tumour transmission selection results and the proportion of hydras developing tumours in F1 and F1 CTRL.
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