What animal evolution can teach medicine

Evolution has helped many species in the animal kingdom to adapt to overcome or resist a series of health problems that medical science tries to solve in humans.

The giraffe, for example, has a gene that protects the heart from damage caused by blood pressure high enough to ruin the human heart. Elephants have multiple copies of a gene, common in mammals, that makes them highly resistant to cancer. And naked mole-rats seem almost immune to the progressive physical deterioration that accompanies old age.

Now, the international team of Dr. Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, cardiologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in the United States, calls on the scientific community to start working systematically on a new a field she and her colleagues refer to as “evolutionary medicine” and which focuses on using knowledge about animal evolution for medical applications.

Studying traits such as those discussed in the giraffe, elephant, and naked mole rat can help to better understand the origins of human diseases and find cures for diseases that seem untreatable.

The Natterson-Horowitz team has also laid out the first guidelines for research work in this field.

a giraffe. (Photo: USGS)

Everything indicates that there are innumerable disease resistance mechanisms among the vast diversity of life on Earth. Bearing this in mind, the study authors consider it necessary to systematically search for these mechanisms, discover their physiological bases, and use these findings as the basis for new clinical treatments and better public health policy.

The study is titled “The future of evolutionary medicine: sparking innovation in biomedicine and public health”. And it has been published in the academic journal Frontiers in Science. (Fountain: NCYT by Amazings)