Benjamin Thompson
speaker
746 appearances
10 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 2 Sep
Benjamin Thompson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 5.
Appearances
Transmissible cancers are rare.
matched
Like, seriously rare.
matched
They've only ever been seen previously in dogs, Tasmanian devils in Australia, and, as Julie says, bivalves.
matched
Several species, in fact.
matched
Things like clams and mussels.
matched
Their name rather gives an idea as to what they are.
matched
A cancer that can be transmitted between individuals.
matched
There are no microbes involved.
matched
A cancer cell is the thing transmitting the disease.
matched
And once it's passed to another host, somehow it avoids being targeted by the immune system and goes on to cause disease.
matched
And it seems that Julie and her colleagues may now have identified a fourth example of a transmissible cancer, and they put forward their evidence in a paper in Nature this week.
matched
This evidence comes from comparing the genetic sequence of tumours and regular tissue from the fish they came from, along with tissue from uninfected fish.
matched
The team looked at both the DNA found within mitochondria and the DNA contained within cell nuclei.
matched
Tumor cells from different fish were essentially clones of each other.
matched
Their DNA shared changes or variants that weren't seen in non-cancerous cells.
matched
These could be small changes to a single DNA letter or big changes, for example where a section of the genome was deleted or duplicated.
matched
And in the nuclear DNA taken from cancer cells, there was a lot of similarity in these variations.
matched
As well as analyzing fish collected in 2023, the team looked at fish samples and data collected in previous years, enabling them to assess how the cancer might have changed over time.
matched
Julie says that the team's results point towards this being one of these very rare transmissible cancers, the first identified in a fish.
matched
Hannah Siddle, from the University of Queensland in Australia, works on immunology, animal disease and genetics.
matched
Showing 561–580 of 746 · page 29 of 38
← Previous
Next →