Testing Nature’s Defenses: Inducing Cancer in the Naked Mole Rat

Although mice develop lung cancer from a single Eml4-Alk driver fusion, Shepard, Lester, and colleagues show that naked mole rats require three simultaneous oncogenic events: Eml4-Alk, Tp53 loss, and Rb1 loss, achieving only 30% tumor penetrance. This inducible cancer model in naked mole rats offers a unique platform for uncovering mechanisms of cancer resistance and modeling rare pleomorphic lung carcinomas. See related article by Shepard et al., p. 35.