Walking Through Elephant Cancer Resistance: What it can teach us about elephants, genetics and disease defenses

Abstract

Cancer is a disease that affects the whole animal kingdom, but it does not behave equally in all the species. Elephants are one of the animals that even though have a greater number of cells in their body they present a low cancer rate. This phenomenon is also known as the Peto’s Paradox. Scientists have concluded that elephants have greater immunity to cancer because their genome has extra copies of tumor suppressor genes: TP53 and LIF. Even though elephants have a big immunity to cancer, they still get the disease, for example Asian elephants are more susceptible of getting reproductive tract neoplasia. Exploring this information is essential to understand how cancer behaves and how our own genes could help us fight the disease. This paper is a review of the actual knowledge the scientific community has regarding how cancer works in elephants, with the final goal of exploring the meaning this has into our understanding of genomics and how it could help us to develop a cure for cancer.