Naked mole-rats reveal clues to aging: longevity, cancer resistance, and hypoxia survival
Naked mole-rats live 30–40 years, show negligible senescence and rare cancer, and tolerate low-oxygen environments, partly due to unusually large hyaluronan that slows cell division and helps regulate growth. They also metabolically adapt to hypoxia, enabling survival in oxygen-poor burrows. These traits provide concrete, testable aging mechanisms that researchers hope may translate to humans; in mice, inserting the mole-rat hyaluronan gene yielded about a 4.4% median lifespan increase and fewer tumors, but the human relevance remains uncertain.
