Jellyfish help scientists understand cancer

Caltech researchers used moon jellyfish to test a mathematical framework linking cell proliferation to cancer risk, publishing their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The conventional assumption — more cell division means more mutation means more cancer — holds only sometimes; the models showed increased proliferation can instead suppress cancer under certain conditions.

Moon jellyfish, which resist cancer even after exposure to carcinogens, proved the point experimentally: when researcher Anish Sarma disabled the jellyfish's ability to proliferate cells, neoplastic growths formed. The team concluded that high proliferation rates enable a kind of cellular 'proofreading' that weeds out potentially cancerous cells before they take hold.

The researchers say the mechanism, if present in human tissue, could inform future cancer therapies, noting that large slow-dividing animals like elephants rarely get cancer while small ones like mice often do — a puzzle the proliferation-proofreading model helps explain.

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