Usually, small animals live shorter lives — not just because they’re more vulnerable to predators and environmental stress, but because their genetics don’t do much to protect them from cell damage over time. Not bats, though. Many bat species live for 20 to 40 years, in the wild or in captivity, baffling scientists.
Even more intriguing: cancer is almost unheard of in bats. That rare resistance has caught the attention of scientists at the University of Rochester, who recently published a study in Nature Communications digging into how bats manage to age so well without succumbing to disease. Their findings reveal three key biological strategies that help bats avoid cancer, insights that could one day improve how we treat or prevent it in humans.
To understand healthy aging, scientists often look to outliers: animals that live long lives without developing age-related diseases. Since cancer typically arises from accumulating genetic damage, ...
