A contagious cancer decimating Tasmanian devils makes itself invisible to the animals’ immune systems, which might otherwise fight it off, a new study shows.
Devil facial tumor disease shuts down production of proteins that normally decorate the surface of cells, telling the body whether a cell is its own or not. As a result, the devil’s immune system doesn’t recognize cancer cells from another devil as a potentially worrisome invader, Hannah Siddle, a marsupial geneticist at the University of Cambridge and an international group of collaborators report online March 11 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The finding could lead to a way to stop the deadly disease. “It’s really the first hope that there could be a vaccine or immune therapy,” says Elizabeth Murchison of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the University of Cambridge. Murchison, who was not involved in the new study, discovered in 2009 that the tumor originated in cells insulating a single devil’s nerve fibers. Since that initial case, which probably occurred in the late 1980s or early 1990s, the disease has spread across eastern and central parts of Tasmania, killing every devil it infects.