Whales don’t get cancer: How bowhead whale DNA could change human health

0:00 Imagine a creature that lives for more than 200 years and weighs as much as a small airplane, yet it rarely gets cancer. That creature is the bowhead whale. A lot of its population lives in the Arctic, just in Canada. And today I'm gonna walk you through recent genetic research that shows how it's this marine giant maintains its genome across centuries. Remember this animal can last or be as much as 200 years old and what that might mean for cancer research, aging and ocean connected health. And what if we could borrow one of its cellular tricks to protect human cells? We're gonna talk about that on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast. Let's start the show. Hey everybody.

0:40 Welcome back to another exciting episode of the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin, marine biologist and science communicator, and this is the podcast where you find out what's happening with the ocean, how you can speak up for the ocean, and what you can do to live for a better ocean by taking action. And if you don't know, this podcast is part of the Speak up for Blue. Podcast Network. We podcast with a purpose and that purpose is ocean conservation. Everything you listen to on this podcast network, the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast, the Beyond Jaws podcast is all about increasing your ocean awareness, your ocean knowledge, and helping habitats, and that's what we're doing in a new project where I launched a campaign to raise funds to launch a Seagrass podcast.

1:23 You're like, Andrew, why? Why in the heck would you want to launch a Seagrass podcast? Nobody knows anything about Seagrass. Exactly. We're gonna learn about Seagrass Meadows. It's research, conservation, and restoration projects that are going on around the world. And when you listen to it and if you contribute to funding this launch, then you get to be a part of restoring seagrass Meadows somewhere in the world. And we'll be documenting it throughout this podcast journey on the Seagrass Effect, a seagrass podcast. If you want to help fund this launch, you can go to speak up for blue.com/. Seagrass, that's speak up for blue.com/seagrass. And let's get back into the show. But it's a really great project, something that I'm very, very dear to me.

2:04 So if you wanna support me in any kind of way, you can do it that way. We'll have other ways you can support as well in the future, but this is the way to support now. and I wanna thank you for doing that. Let's get back into this exciting research. cancer is one hell of a disease. Nobody wants to see that happen. I watched my dad go through it. I watched him unfortunately pass away from it. It is the most heartbreaking thing you can do because the treatment for cancer, is horrible. You get chemotherapy, radiotherapy, it breaks down your cells, it breaks down muscles in your body. You get weak. You feel like crap. It is not fun. So imagine, imagine if there's a way that we can treat cancer in a better way that will help not only get rid of cancer, but also repair the body cells that are overcome by tumors.

2:49 That is the possibility of this research coming out of nature in 2025, where they talked about bowhead whales, one of the oldest living beings and one of the heaviest living animals on the planet. It lives for up to 200 years or greater than 200 years. It can weigh 80,000 kilos. That's 80,000 kilos. That's insane. And so, you know, we're fascinated by the size, the great size, and the long life. So logically you would think. Longer life, bigger size. A lot of cells, you would get more cancer, there'd be a higher cancer risk, but yet they don't. There's a thing called Petos Paradox. I think I'm pronouncing it properly, PETO paradox. And in that it says, look, if you have a higher body size, you live longer, your cells are gonna mutate, your cells are gonna change and they're gonna break and they're not gonna be able to repair.

3:36 And so tumors are gonna be able to get on that, and you're gonna have a higher cancer risk. That's not the best. So how do they go almost cancer free for their entire lives? And this is what's kind of cool about it. The evidence for improved DNA repair in long-lived bowhead whales is the actual title of the study that came out in nature. Okay, so let's break it down. Here's what happens. Essentially you have a DNA strand, a number of like millions and billions and billions of DNA strands in your body that gives you the characteristics of your body that you have. So it gives you eye color, hair color, what your body's gonna look like, how your muscles are built, how your body's gonna feel, the diseases that you might get, so on and so on and so on. And as you get older, those cells start to break, right?

4:18 They start to mutate. And those mutations in the human body could cause cancer in the future. So as you get older and your body and your cells start to break in your DNA, which is a double helix, starts to break other cells like tumor cells come in and start to repair that or start to bind to that, and you get these tumorous cells, which can cause cancer. But a bowhead whale that lives 200 years old and is very, very large, 80,000 kilograms. Well now you're talking about a body that should have a lot of cancer in it, but it doesn't. And the reason why it doesn't is because when the cell breaks at some point, and the DNA, the helix molecule breaks. It has proteins that promotes the repair, the accurate repair of this double helix. So if it was just a single helix, it would probably repair a lot faster, even in humans.

5:00 But because it's double helix and it twists, it has to come together pretty accurately and that's what makes the repair. So having this excess of this protein and sort of low mutation rates within the fibroblasts of the cell. These things will induce a lifetime where you don't have cancer. And the fact that they can repair is making it a lot better 'cause the tumor cells can't, you know, bind into these damaged cells over that time. So this is something that is pretty cool when you see in marine mammals and the fact that we are mammals and we could maybe have something similar. What are the implications for cancer research? So for humans, cancer prevention is partly about preventing or repairing the DNA damage and the bowhead data suggests boosting repair fidelity, like that actually boosting that repair might be a complimentary path to tumor suppression.

5:49 Instead of just trying to kill all the cells that are the tumor cells, you want to be able to promote the regeneration and the accurate repair, and actually as you promote the repair, you suppress all the tumor cells, which is kind of cool. So the application, which is kind of cool, is that research into this protein, you can have gene therapy and small molecule activators. There are biomarker developments for genomic stability, so making sure that you get more stable genomes and has insights into aging. So less mutation accumulation could make it a healthier lifespan. So maybe even lengthening our lives just a little bit longer, which could be good, could be bad. I don't know what that's gonna look like in the future. but the fact that if we get cancer, avoid the long-term effects of cancer and the treatments that we have to face like chemotherapy and radiation, which is what is effective now to kill the cancer cells by being able to promote the repair of those damaged cells.

6:41 And suppress those tumors can be really great for cancer research and cancer patients in the future. Now the fact that we got to learn about these bowhead whales shows that we need to promote more research, not just studying bowhead whales, but studying the environment in general. We know how many things that we've benefited off of nature, but we don't know the things that we don't know already. And if we stop doing research, if we stop funding research that looks at the genomes of bowhead whales or why certain whales get less cancer or certain sharks get less cancer than others we'll be a lot slower at preventing diseases like cancer in the future. There are times like at one point I hope that cancer will be one of those things like, yeah, remember people used to die of cancer like quite a bit.

7:23 Hopefully in the future it'll just be like, yeah, now we just have this gene therapy that we can cure this cancer and people can live longer, which would be great to see less suffering from people who have unfortunately had passed away, including my dad, have passed away of cancer. Like I said before, it's not something that you wanna see anybody go through. It's a horrible, horrible disease. And the treatment, It is terrible to watch somebody go through that. And so by funding cancer research or funding environmental research and looking at the genomes of certain animals, we could look at the secrets of how specific animals avoid cancer, like large marine mammals that are long lived, how they can avoid having cancer and live for such a long time. And healthy, you know, I think that's something that would be really great.

8:05 But we have to fund this research. We have to understand that keeping species around, not just for the stability of habitats and the stability of what we love and know about the ocean in terms stability of fisheries, if they're managed right, stability of the coastal system and security of a coastal system, so no eroding and less floods, all that kind of stuff, really helps us, you know, live longer lives and healthier lives and not have to worry about dying from floods or being affected by floods, or even just loss of economic viability in terms of fisheries, in terms of tourism and so forth. When you see a habitat just go by the wayside, because we're losing that diversity, we're losing that stability within each habitat. So funding research that protects biodiversity, not only helps in securing our coastlines and also offering a lot of economic benefits, but also having health benefits by discovering more about these species as we learn more and more.

8:58 Funding science is important. Funding conservation is important, and understanding these animals is really important to our own health as we can see here. Hopefully in the future, this is something that we can benefit from and see less cancer patients in the future or even have better therapy for those cancer patients and get better as soon as possible. Bowhead whales teach us about DNA repair and longevity. That's cool. It's a potential for human cancer research, which is even better. But so much work needs to happen and that funding needs to happen. So when we see governments stop funding on environmental research or stop funding conservation or stop funding just regular management of oceans or lands. That's not good.

9:38 That can affect our health in the future, our longevity as a human species of course, but also individually our health. just coming from like a health perspective. I think that's something that's really interesting. Now, what can you do about this? What is the call to action? One, you can support research like this by liking and subscribing to this video to support the spread of this research. Let's increase our knowledge about what we know about the ocean, about its animals and how it can help us as well. Of course, we're not just doing it to help us, but it's a benefit that the more we know about these animals, the more we can apply it to us as a human species. But the other thing is too, is support research, support graduate students, support doctors and support facilities that does this type of research, and be able to find cures for things like cancer, for the vaccinations, for things like, we've done in the past and polio and measles and things like that to decrease the diseases that affect our health.

10:30 That's what's really important when it comes into learning about the ocean. I think that's something that's really, really cool and something that we need to look at. Now, something that we need to also look at is that this is not something that is going to be a cure for cancer anytime soon, like tomorrow. We need to be cautious about certain things. So most of this work that's done is done in fibroblasts, which is connective tissue cells. Cancer in humans often arises in epithelial cells, so like skin cells. We don't know yet what whale epithelial cells behave. We don't know how they behave. and if it's identical to the way humans epithelial cells or if the cells repair just like the ones in the fibroblasts and the connective tissue. And then translating that whale repair machinery to humans will face many, many challenges, right?

11:15 Different physiology, different lifespans, evolutionary distance. There's a lot of things that are different between our bodies and marine mammal bodies, obviously, and so that it might be a little different in the way it applies. And over repair is not always benign, so there may be trade-offs, for example. Too much repair could affect like cell cycle regulation, tissue turnover, et cetera. There's a lot of things that can go wrong. Researchers caution about optimizing DNA repair without unintended consequences. So like we can't just go and say, Hey, this is how we repair DNA. This is gonna be perfect for curing cancer, but it might lead to other things that we have to worry about in the future. And then of course, longevity is multifactorial. It's not always just with the repair of DNA, you repair one piece, but environment, metabolism, reproduction predation, and other life history traits also matters.

12:02 So it all depends. Like whales are huge. They may not come up against apex predators, like orcas all the time, right? There's always changes that can happen. So that's something that we have to be careful of when we're looking at this. So it's just some things to be cautious about. Obviously I'm gonna be cautiously optimistic about this research. It's very dear to me. I'd love to see people not have to suffer from cancer. Obviously. I'm sure you do the same thing ' cause it affects everybody all over the world and it's something that we want to stamp out. So, that's all I have to say. That's all I got for today's episode. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Let me know in the comments below if you're watching this on YouTube. If you are listening to this on your favorite podcast app, just hit me up on how to protect the ocean on Instagram at how to protect the ocean.

12:42 And of course, if you want to contact me through my email, you can go to speak up for blue.com/contact and you can get ahold of me there. I wanna thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin. From the true Nordstrom and free. Have a great day. We'll talk to you next time in Happy Conservation.