Vivek Subbiah, Chief of Early-Phase Drug Development at the Sarah Cannon Research Institute, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“At 200+ years, the bowhead whale outlives every other mammal and tips the scales at 80,000 kg. Yet it rarely gets cancer.
A Nature paper digs into the mystery, spotlighting unique DNA‑repair genes with implications for aging and cancer biology.
Peto’s paradox keeps getting more interesting
Peto’s paradox is the observation that bigger, longer‑lived animals don’t get more cancer than smaller ones , even though they have vastly more cells and time for mutations to accumulate.
Whales, elephants, and other giants have no higher cancer . This mismatch between expectation and reality is what Richard Peto described in 1977 -now known as Peto’s paradox.”
Title: Evidence for improved DNA repair in the long-lived bowhead whale
Authors: Denis Firsanov, Max Zacher, Xiao Tian, Todd L. Sformo, Yang Zhao, Gregory Tombline, J. Yuyang Lu, Zhizhong Zheng, Luigi Perelli, Enrico Gurreri, Li Zhang, Jing Guo, Anatoly Korotkov, Valentin Volobaev, Seyed Ali Biashad, Zhihui Zhang, Johanna Heid, Alexander Y. Maslov, Shixiang Sun, Zhuoer Wu, Jonathan Gigas, Eric C. Hillpot, John C. Martinez, Minseon Lee, Alyssa Williams, Abbey Gilman, Nicholas Hamilton, Ekaterina Strelkova, Ena Haseljic, Avnee Patel, Maggie E. Straight, Nalani Miller, Julia Ablaeva, Lok Ming Tam, Chloé Couderc, Michael R. Hoopmann, Robert L. Moritz, Shingo Fujii, Amandine Pelletier, Dan J. Hayman, Hongrui Liu, Yuxuan Cai, Anthony K. L. Leung, Zhengdong Zhang, C. Bradley Nelson, Lisa M. Abegglen, Joshua D. Schiffman, Vadim N. Gladyshev, Carlo C. Maley, Mauro Modesti, Giannicola Genovese, Mirre J. P. Simons, Jan Vijg, Andrei Seluanov, Vera Gorbunova
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