Naked mole rats are not pretty, but they may be one of the most useful animals in aging research. The wrinkled, hairless rodents can live more than 40 years — nearly ten times longer than a regular mouse — and they rarely develop cancer, arthritis, or the heart disease that normally arrive with age.
Researchers at the University of Rochester have now shown that one of those biological advantages can be transferred into another mammal. By moving a gene linked to the naked mole rat's unusually high levels of high molecular weight hyaluronic acid (HMW-HA) into mice, the team produced animals that lived healthier, longer lives.
The modified mice saw an approximate 4.4 percent increase in median lifespan compared with ordinary mice — a modest gain, but a meaningful one. They also had fewer spontaneous tumors, stronger resistance to chemically induced skin cancer, and less chronic inflammation as they aged.
"Our study provides a proof of principle that unique longevity mechanisms that evolved in long-lived mammalian species can be exported to improve the lifespans of other mammals," said Vera Gorbunova, the Doris Johns Cherry Professor of biology and medicine at Rochester and one of the project leads.
A protective sugar molecule
The gene the team focused on is hyaluronan synthase 2, which helps produce HMW-HA. All mammals make a version of this gene, but the naked mole rat version appears especially active. As a result, naked mole rats carry roughly ten times more HMW-HA in their tissues than mice or humans.
In earlier studies, the same Rochester lab had shown that stripping HMW-HA away from naked mole rat cells made them more vulnerable to forming tumors. That raised the obvious question: if HMW-HA is part of why naked mole rats stay healthy for decades, could it do the same job in a different species?
To find out, Gorbunova, biology professor Andrei Seluanov, and their colleagues engineered mice to carry the naked mole rat version of the gene. The result was higher levels of HMW-HA throughout the modified mice's tissues.
Less inflammation, better aging
The protective effects went beyond cancer. The mice carrying the naked mole rat gene stayed healthier overall, lived longer, had less inflammation in multiple tissues, and maintained better gut health into old age.
That last part matters more than it sounds. Chronic, low-grade inflammation is one of the most consistent biological signatures of aging — the kind of slow, persistent damage that links healthy decades to the diseases that eventually arrive. Reducing it across multiple tissues in a single experiment is unusual.
The researchers believe HMW-HA may be doing some of its work by directly influencing the immune system, although the exact mechanism still needs more study.
Why a 4.4% bump matters
A 4.4 percent increase in median lifespan is not a headline-grabbing number on its own. The deeper significance is that a longevity mechanism evolved in one mammalian species was successfully ported into another.
That opens a door. Nature has already produced animals with remarkable resilience — bowhead whales that live more than 200 years, naked mole rats that shrug off cancer, certain bats with unusual longevity for their size. If the biological tools behind those traits can be identified, characterized, and adapted, the long-term implications for human healthspan research are significant.
"It took us 10 years from the discovery of HMW-HA in the naked mole rat to showing that HMW-HA improves health in mice," Gorbunova noted — a reminder that translating evolution into therapy is slow, careful work.
The team is now exploring whether HMW-HA-based approaches could one day be used to protect human cells and tissues from age-related damage. It will be years before any of that reaches a clinic, but the principle is now established: one species' biological gift can, in some cases, be given to another.
