Cancer prevention
During the study, scientists extracted white blood cells from elephants and damaged the cells' DNA.
"It's as if the elephants said, 'It's so important that we don't get cancer, we're going to kill this cell and start over fresh,'" said Joshua Schiffman, one of the study's author and a pediatric oncologist at the University of Utah School of Medicine.
"If you kill the damaged cell, it's gone, and it can't turn into cancer. This may be more effective of an approach to cancer prevention than trying to stop a mutated cell from dividing and not being able to completely repair itself."
The study involved work by researchers from the two universities, and the Ringling Bros. Center for Elephant Conservation. The results were published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association.