ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2009
Hypersensitivity to contact inhibition provides a clue to cancer resistance of naked mole-rat.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2009. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 197 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
197 citing papers in PubMed, 396 citations in OpenAlex.
- Epigenetic insights into extreme longevity in the world's oldest terrestrial animal, Jonathan.Science advances · 2026Article
- Evolutionary genetics of ageing.Nature reviews. Genetics · 2026Review
- A Homology-Based Application to Diagnose Colorectal Adenoma and Early-Stage Cancer.Pathology international · 2026Article
- Comparative analysis of naked mole-rat thermogenesis and its potential to maintain euthermia in response to cold.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Conserved Pathways, Divergent Outcomes: A Cross-Species Genomic Perspective on the Cancer-Neurodegeneration Paradox.International journal of molecular sciences · 2026Review
- Structures of naked mole-rat, tuco-tuco, and guinea pig ribosomes-is rRNA fragmentation linked to translational fidelity?Nucleic acids research · 2026Article
- The Everlasting Ovary: Decoding the Mechanisms of Lifelong Oogenesis in the Naked Mole-Rat.Results and problems in cell differentiation · 2026Review
- Learning from plants: is it possible to make an animal organism a non-host for cancer?Frontiers in oncology · 2026Article
- More than one species of the naked mole-rat, a new biomedical model.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Do turtles get cancer?Bioscience · 2025Review
- Unlocking longevity through the comparative biology of aging.Nature aging · 2025Review
- Trans-Scale Insights into Variability in Radiation Cancer Risk Across Tissues, Individuals, and Species.Biology · 2025Review
- Structures of Naked Mole-Rat, Tuco-Tuco, and Guinea Pig Ribosomes-Is rRNA Fragmentation Linked to Translational Fidelity?bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Towards a more robust comparative oncology: a Bayesian reanalysis of Peto's paradox and discussion of comparative cancer risk studies in vertebrates.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Metabolic expenditure of submaximal locomotion in naked mole-rats (Heterocephalus glaber) and Damaraland mole-rats (Fukomys damarensis).The Journal of experimental biology · 2025Article
- Natural resistance to cancers in long-lived mammals: genomic mechanisms and experimental evidence to explain Peto's paradox.Science China. Life sciences · 2025Article
- Limited cell-autonomous anticancer mechanisms in long-lived bats.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Article
- The kinetics of uracil-N-glycosylase distribution inside replication foci.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Utilisation of High Molecular Weight and Ultra-High Molecular Weight Hyaluronan in Management of Glioblastoma.Gels (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
137 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
Authors and funding
8 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The naked mole-rat is the longest living rodent with a maximum lifespan exceeding 28 years. In addition to its longevity, naked mole-rats have an extraordinary resistance to cancer as tumors have never been observed in these rodents. Furthermore, we show that a combination of activated Ras and SV40 LT fails to induce robust anchorage-independent growth in naked mole-rat cells, while it readily transforms mouse fibroblasts. The mechanisms responsible for the cancer resistance of naked mole-rats were unknown. Here we show that naked mole-rat fibroblasts display hypersensitivity to contact inhibition, a phenomenon we termed "early contact inhibition." Contact inhibition is a key anticancer mechanism that arrests cell division when cells reach a high density. In cell culture, naked mole-rat fibroblasts arrest at a much lower density than those from a mouse. We demonstrate that early contact inhibition requires the activity of p53 and pRb tumor suppressor pathways. Inactivation of both p53 and pRb attenuates early contact inhibition. Contact inhibition in human and mouse is triggered by the induction of p27(Kip1). In contrast, early contact inhibition in naked mole-rat is associated with the induction of p16(Ink4a). Furthermore, we show that the roles of p16(Ink4a) and p27(Kip1) in the control of contact inhibition became temporally separated in this species: the early contact inhibition is controlled by p16(Ink4a), and regular contact inhibition is controlled by p27(Kip1). We propose that the additional layer of protection conferred by two-tiered contact inhibition contributes to the remarkable tumor resistance of the naked mole-rat.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.