Science Friday - Can Animal Super-Agers Teach Us Their Secrets?

Episode Date: November 19, 2025

Some animals have a very different relationship to aging than we do: They don’t get cancer, they never go through menopause, and they live absurdly long lives. For instance, one bat species can live for more than 40 years, which may not sound like very long but that’s about nine times longer than expected based on its size. For comparison, if we aged on that scale, we’d live for hundreds of years. These bats aren’t the only animal super-agers—there’s a whole menagerie of them.So what’s their secret? And can we learn anything from them that might help us live longer, healthier lives? Host Flora Lichtman talks with longevity researchers Vera Gorbunova and Juan Manuel Vazquez about what animals are teaching us.Guests:Dr. Vera Gorbunova is a biologist and professor at the University of Rochester, and a co-director of the Rochester Aging Research Center.Dr. Juan Manuel Vazquez is a biologist and assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University studying the evolution of aging.Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Hey, it's Flora Lickman, and you're listening to Science Friday. Today on the show, looking for the fountain of youth in the animal kingdom. It would be like an Olympic athlete, basically, that runs casual triathlons every day, living an insanely long time, like two or four hundred years. Some animals have a very different relationship to aging than we do. They don't get cancer. They never go through menopause. And they live these absurdly long lives.

For instance, one bat species can live for over 40 years. That may not sound like a long time, but that's like nine times longer than you'd expect based on their size. For comparison, if we aged like these bats, we'd be living for hundreds of years. And these bats aren't the only super-agers. There's a whole menagerie of them. So what's their secret? And can we learn anything from them that might help us live longer, healthier lives? We're talking to two scientists.

Dr. Vera Gorbinova, a professor and biologist at the University of Rochester and a trailblazer in this field who's been studying aging for over 20 years. And Dr. Juan Manuel Vasquez, a biologist and assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University studying how super aging evolved mostly in bats. Vera, Manny, welcome to Science Friday. Thank you for having us. Hello. Yeah, thank you. Let's start with these bats. Tell me a little bit more about them and what makes them unusual. all. Now, bats are very amazing. There are thousands of species of bats, but among them, there are many bats that, as you just mentioned, live much longer than would be predicted based on their size,

because generally, animals that are larger, they tend to live longer. So bats are clear exception. If you plot, for example, 200 different mammalian species on a graph, so land, Jevity versus body mass, so bats would be off the line. They're off the charts. Yes. And in addition to this long life, they're quite healthy. And when they fly, their metabolism gets very high. So sometimes people would say, oh, well, there are some species that live very long time.

For example, Greenland shark is very famous. They can live for 100 years, but they live very slowly. which may not be that lifestyle humans would want to adopt the swim. They eat maybe once a year, swimming in cold water. But that's not the case for bats. When bats fly, their metabolism is also off the charts, but yet they can kind of compensate for it and not develop diseases that would be linked to high metabolism.

So they live long and fast and healthy. Yes, exactly. That's, I think, like, the thing that's, it's really important to contextualize, right? Like, the world record holder is Brantz bat, which was caught as an adult tagged and released, and then caught 42 years later. That bat was active out in the wild hunting in three-dimensional space, remembers where to go to find prey, remembers where to go back home. So imagine knowing casually, without any GPS, how to go from Rochester, New York, to, like state college without looking at any like interstate maps, right? You have to travel like, I can't get to the gas station in my town, Manning. Exactly. Right. And so like somehow not only do

they do know how to do that, they know how to do that while flying, while like all the aerobic activity necessary for flying. Like there's so much that's insane about that physiology. And then when you throw into it like the yeah, they also live a ridiculously long time, right? It would be like an Olympic athlete, basically, that runs casual triathlons every day living an insanely long time at 2, 400 years, as we said. Vera, when we talk about aging, what are we talking about on the, you know, molecular or cellular level? Like, what is biologically happening when we age? Well, this is a very important question. And there are many different answers to it, because aging is a very important question. It's a very important question. Aging is a complex process.

Many things deteriorate over time. So if we think about aging at the cellular level, not only we accumulate mutations in DNA that can be linked to cancer, we see various types of damage that accumulate to proteins, lipids, DNA. There is also loss of organization of chromatines. because if you think of DNA as a very long thread that contains the words in it for making proteins,

this thread needs to be packaged in a certain way, otherwise it will get all tangled. So it is organized in a very specific way in young cells, and there are some regions that are more open, and these are the regions that are more active, and they produce RNA and make protein, then there are other regions that are more tightly condensed, and they may contain even some undesirable things like transposable elements that are virus-like

parts of our genome, so-called dark genome. But as we get older, what happens, those regions that are open start to close a little bit, and those that are closed like these transposable elements, they start to open up and these parasitic elements now become more active. And that affects how the cell functions. level. Vera, I know you've studied a number of different animals. You just published research on bowhead whales. Why are you interested in these whales? Well, bowhead whale is amazing because it is the only mammal that lives longer than human. Bowhead whales can live 200 years and probably longer.

this is very remarkable to maintain their bodies in perfect order for two centuries. They don't get cancer? Yes, there were no documented cases of cancer in Bowhead whales. And another aspect that makes them extremely interesting, along with other large whales, is their size. because statistically, the more cells are within the body, the more likely would be the chance of developing tumors. So it should be proportional to the number of cells. But whales are extremely large.

They are 2,000 times larger than an average human, if you're just thinking about body mass. But they are not 2,000 times more likely to develop cancer, which means they evolved adaptations to resist cancer that we humans don't have. And you found, it seems, a clue into this. Yes, so it was interesting because originally our hypothesis was that whales probably are similar to another very large organism that was studied. So this concept, by the way, of larger organisms,

not developing cancer despite statistically being likely to do so, is called Petus Paradox. Yes, and we've talked about it on the show because elephants are a test case, right? Right. So what elephants have, they amplified. Wait, stay with whales. Stay with whales for us. Well, I must say a word about elephants so that you will understand.

Okay, okay. Because in the elephants, they enhanced the way cells are the surveillance, so like eliminating cells that are damaged. So that is the strategy for elephants. Bad cells get rid of them very quickly. And that was our hypothesis for the whale, but this is not what we found. We found that the whale enhances maintenance. They just don't accumulate mutations as fast.

And when they are faced with DNA damage, they deal with it much more efficiently. They don't kill their cells very readily, but they maintain their cells. like they don't let things deteriorate to the point that it's necessary to eliminate the cell. How do they do it? Well, they have very high levels of a protein called CIRBP or cold-induced RNA binding protein. And what we found is that this protein promotes more efficient DNA repair and it protects from mutations. So we humans also have this protein. But we make very small amount of it, and whales make maybe 100 times more.

And as the name suggests, it's cold-induced. So it has something to do with cold and whales live in cold. But we hypothesized that evolutionarily, they upregulated this protein first to deal with cold. But then it was also co-opted to help the DNA repair. And this way, whales enhanced their maintenance strategy. because I'm thinking the strategy of an elephant is good, but maybe up to a point, if you plan to live more than 100 years and you're eliminating cells very readily, you may deplete your stem cell resource.

Run out of cells. Yes. So maybe for the lifespans that exceed 200 years, well, you need a different strategy. You just need to prevent these mutations in the first place. Did you test putting this protein or sort of higher levels of this protein in human cells? Yes, that was the most exciting part. When we put this protein in human cells, it improved the way cells repaired breaks in the DNA. So they became about twice more efficient.

So just with one protein, which for me was the most exciting finding because it means there is room for improvement in human DNA report. pair. For many researchers, human DNA repairs seemed like something like okay, we are given it, we cannot make it any better. If we even try, we can change the balance

between different repair proteins and things would get worse. But what this study demonstrates that we actually can make it better and that gives hope for longevity and also for cancer prevention because if we can make ourselves not generate mutations, we can prevent cancer from happening.

Mani, the bats you study also seem to not get cancer, right? Is the mechanism the same? If you look at the leaderboard for the 20 species of the lowest cancer risk, about five of them are bats. So bats both have the ability to improve their DNA repair. So when they acquire damage, they're better at dealing with it than, like, say, a mouse is, but they also have a very elephant-like mechanism where they're also able to purge damage cells. So it's basically having like both the ability to maintain a better genome and also a better sorting facility for getting rid of the jump. We have to take a quick break, but don't go away because when we come back, can animal superagers teach us how to live longer, healthier lives?

If we learn from evolution how to live like a bat that can fly until its last day, I mean, that would be amazing if people could enjoy their lives productively until the very last day. You know, Vera, I think everyone listening to this is wondering, can we learn from these animals to help ourselves live not just longer lives, but healthier lives? Oh, yes, we could learn so much. And if we talk about genome maintenance and more accurate DNA repair, that seems to be conserved across many long-lived mammals, long-lived animals. But the mechanisms are different, which is amazing.

So we looked at anti-cancer mechanisms in Naked Morat. We find something entirely different. They evolved unique adaptations linked to subterranean lifestyle. They started making a lot of chloronic acid to scleroneic acid to scorn. squeeze through tunnels and that now prevents cancer in them. Oh, wow. And also people know that from skincare, right? Yes, it isn't skincare.

It's in many cosmetics, but in the naked mold, they have it inside their skin in a very large quantities. So their evolution took this path. And we humans, we're also pretty good at DNA repair, but we didn't have the same evolutionary pressures. So we are missing some of these adaptations. and we can develop some strategies to bring these adaptations into human biology. And then we would definitely benefit because it's something that we are missing, but we can improve upon.

What do you expect the treatment to look like? Is it gene therapy? Is it a pill of whale protein? Well, there may be different strategies depending on every adaptation. So let's say with Naked Morat, we are a little bit further along because we were thinking, okay, how can we increase the level of chloronic acid? Of course, you can apply it with a cream, but it won't get through your skin. It's just a good moisturizer.

But if we develop small molecules to slow down, breakdown of degradation of chloron inside our skin, then we can increase our own levels of chloronic acid. And that was, we published a paper because we gave this small molecule to mice with cancer, and they became a little bit more like Naked Morad's, their tumors didn't spread it, just with applying the small molecule that could be orally administered. We also, because of basic science research, just have a lot of data and also pharmacological research, a lot of these big databases of how different drugs change your gene regulatory networks.

So another way of translating this research is just looking at those two things with machine learning and taking advantage of the new AI tools now out to basically look for drugs that are already FDA-approved that happen to have these beneficial, oh, it makes this look more like the Naked Morat or it makes this look more like the bowhead whale, right? Is any of this moving out of the lab and into clinical trials?

We analyzed DNA pair across 25 species of rodents, and we found the innate pair was more efficient in long-lived rodents due to another protein, not CRBP, but protein called Sir 2 and 6. It's also a genome maintenance protein. And we search for activators and we found a natural compound from brown seaweed called Foucoiden. So it's very healthy. People in Japan, South Korea, eat brown seaweed as part of soups and stews. So it's very safe.

And we took Foucden. We found it activates 36 very strongly. Then we gave Foucdin to all mice, and mice started to live longer, and their genome stability improved. So right now, we already started a clinical trial, and we see if now the strategy that we learned from rodent studies can actually be safely applied to extend human health. Foucaid, you heard it here first. Mani, what's your hope for this research?

You know, if you ask an audience of people who here has had someone die of cancer, who here has had no someone who has, like, died of heart disease, right? So, like, you don't usually get hands that are lowered. And these are things that have a huge, like, societal impact, right? Like, we spend so much money just trying to, like, play this game of whackable to deal with, like, all the different ways cancer can pop up and all the different ways heart disease can pop up. the thing that's really interesting about studying long-lived animals is that they live long, and so as a result, they have a lot of preventative mechanisms as well.

So we're not just talking about using like naked mole rats and elephants and whales and bats to discover cures for cancer and aging and heart disease. We're actually also talking about looking for preventatives for all these things. So that way people will eventually be in a generation that barely knows what cancer is, right? Or, you know, like any other kind of like age-related illness. Vera, your hopes for this research? Yes, I'm also looking into the future where there will be less human suffering because these diseases, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, they cause so much human suffering. And if we learn from evolution how to live like a bat that can fly until its last day,

I mean, that would be amazing if people could enjoy their lives productively until the very last day. So this is my hope. Dr. Vera Gorbanova is a professor at the University of Rochester and co-director of the Rochester Aging Research Center. And Dr. Juan Manuel Vasquez is a biologist and assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University. Thank you both for joining me today. Thank you. Today's episode was produced by Rasha Aridi. I'm Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.