Think about a pink hair-less creature with huge front teeth that scurries around holes with about 80 other friends. No it is not a creature from a cartoon but the naked mole rat. Naked mole-rats (Heterocephalus glaber) are one of the most bizarre mammals known to science and they might be our best bet to get rid of cancer. Body mass is usually a good predictor of a species maximum life span but naked mole-rats break the trend. They are a similar size to mice and yet mice rarely live longer than 3.5 years (as their body mass predicts), while naked mole-rats live up to 30 years. It is still unclear how naked mole-rats are able to live such long and healthy lives, but they have been used for a model to examine several theories about how ageing occurs. One likely factor underlying the longevity of naked mole-rats is their resistance to cancer. Recent findings suggest that naked mole-rat cells are resistant to changes that make a normal cell cancerous. The cure to cancer might lie in these tinny pink hairless creatures. Moreover, naked mole-rat brains are remarkably resistant to hypoxia low oxygen levels and maintain nervous activity for much longer than mice during bouts of low oxygen levels. Hypoxia commonly occurs during strokes and thus studying mechanisms underlying how the naked mole-rat copes with hypoxia may lead a better understanding of how to treat stroke-related damage.
