Kissil Lab in Press: Naked Mole Rat Cancer Model in Cancer Discovery

We made it to the cover of the January 2026 edition of Cancer Discovery! This paper highlights work completed during Alyssa's PhD dissertation project, with significant contributions from our postdoc, Dan. This also solidifies the Kissil Lab as leaders in naked mole rat in vivo cancer models.

In Shepard et al., 2026, we show that naked mole rats do indeed get cancer. However, the mechanism of cancer development differs from other rodent models. While mice and rats only need one to two oncogenes to induce tumorigenesis, naked mole rats required three transformative events: the oncogene Eml4-Alk and simultaneous loss of tumor suppressors Tp53 and Rb1. This suggests naked mole rats develop cancer in a way that is more similar to humans. Perhaps they would serve as a more accurate model of tumorigenesis, or so we speculate.

Read the paper at Cancer Discovery!