What whales can teach us about cancer

New research reveals how bowhead whales live more than 200 years and rarely develop cancer, offering promising insights into DNA repair and human disease resistance.

To determine whether the virus was traveling so far north, Costa and her colleagues used drones to collect samples of “whale blow,” the air expelled through the animal’s blowhole.(Image: FreePik)

By: Science Desk

3 min readNew DelhiNov 13, 2025 04:16 PM IST First published on: Nov 11, 2025 at 09:04 AM IST

Nature, perhaps, has all the answers for modern-day maladies. One of the biggest mysteries in biology is known as Peto’s Paradox, which essentially means the bigger an animal is, the more cells it has. Consequently, there are more DNA those cells need to copy as they divide. This also means more chances of DNA mutations, and since a buildup of mutations is one of the main causes of cancer, large animals should, in theory, get cancer more often and should be dying young.

But, that ‘s not what happens. A team of international scientists has unravelled how the bowhead whale, the longest-living mammal on Earth, can survive over 200 years and rarely develop cancer. The study published in Nature (November 2025) offers the clearest genetic explanation so far for this extraordinary longevity.

The scientists were confronted with the most evident question – “With so many cells, so much DNA, and so much time for mutations to accumulate, how do they stay healthy for so long?” The study offers some key answers to this.

Firstly, they studied whether whale cells are simply more capable of handling mutations than human cells. As part of their study, they deliberately introduced cancer-associated mutations into both whale and human cells to see how many it would take for the cells to become malignant. Whale cells transformed with fewer cancer-causing mutations than human cells. However, their DNA accumulated far fewer spontaneous errors, suggesting a superior repair mechanism rather than a weaker defense.

Also Read | Where you see a fancy fish, engineers see Alan Turing’s math

With this finding, the scientists shifted their focus to how often these mutations occur naturally. They found out that whale DNA mutates at a much lower rate than human DNA. Put simply, one major reason for mutations is something known as a ‘double-strand break’, which is when both strands of a DNA snap. To fix this, cells usually reconnect the broken ends through a process called non-homologous end joining (NHEJ). However, if the DNA ends are damaged, this “quick fix” can lead to errors, much like glueing a broken mirror back together and still seeing the cracks.

The study indicates that whales excel at this repair process. Their cells are much better at NHEJ. In simple words, they are capable of melting the mirror back together rather than glueing it.

Scientists also found that a protein called CIRBP (cold-inducible RNA-binding protein) plays a key role. Humans also have CIRBP, but the whale version works far more efficiently. When researchers inserted the whale’s version of the protein into human cells, the cells became better at repairing DNA, leading to fewer mutations.

The findings open doors to future therapies that could mimic the whale’s DNA-repair mechanisms in humans, potentially reducing cancer risk and slowing aging. The research was led by Vera Gorbunova, Andrei Seluanov, and Jan Vijg from the University of Rochester and Albert Einstein College of Medicine, with collaborators from Johns Hopkins University, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Harvard Medical School, and several other institutes across the US and Europe.