The Shocking Revelation of a fatal type of Cancer

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Menna Jones peered into a trap, and a Tasmanian devil peered back at her. Its gaze was somehow off. The devil’s face seemed misshapen, and its jaw was raw and red. Perhaps, she thought, the swelling was an infected wound. Many devils are torn up by the end of the breeding season, after a month of winning and defending mates.

Jones, a biologist at the University of Tasmania, was trying to decipher the social structure of the island’s iconic creature, the largest meat-eating marsupial in existence. Were the devils promiscuous, as many researchers suspected? Which ones were studly and prolific, and which ones were losing the reproductive race? This fellow was one of many helping Jones answer those questions in June 2001 at her study site on the Freycinet Peninsula, a crooked finger of land in eastern Tasmania.

Jones reached for a canvas sack, tipped the cage gently and shook the black, beagle-size animal into the bag. Then she sat on the ground, legs wrapped around the bagged animal. Gripping him firmly, she pulled the bag back to measure his head. It was a dance she’d performed hundreds of times, moving smoothly and predictably so the devils knew what to expect.

Sometimes after she released a devil, it stayed in her lap and sniffed the sunscreen on her arm or buried its furry face in her armpit to hide from the sun. Although this devil was new to her — he was at the neck of the peninsula, which she visited only once a year — she often trapped the same devils dozens of times over the years, watching them grow from tiny imps in their mothers’ pouches to the grizzled old age of about 5.
When she pulled the bag back from this devil’s face, her soothing ritual faltered. A mass obliterated his right eye and erupted into an oozing, red-and-black cauliflower across his cheek. Another swelling deformed his left cheek into a deceptive chipmunk-chubbiness.

These facial growths were ominously familiar to Jones, though few others had ever seen one. Two years earlier, she’d observed strange tumors on a third of the devils she’d trapped 100 miles to the north. At the time, she thought perhaps they’d been exposed to some toxin.
Lacking a camera, she could take only measurements and descriptions to a wildlife veterinarian. He told her the only way he could figure out what ailed her devils would be if she were to euthanize one and bring it to him. “I was horrified at the thought that you’d euthanize a devil just to find out what it was sick with,” Jones told me, sitting in her office in the port town of Hobart. “Interesting to think back on that now that tens of thousands have died.”

Over the remainder of Jones’ 2001 trip to Freycinet, two more strapping 3-year-old males appeared in her traps with tumors on their faces. One of these tumors spread across the devil’s jaw and then dissolved, leaving a gaping hole. He could no longer eat. With no qualms about putting this doomed creature out of his misery, Jones brought him to a veterinary pathologist. Cancer, the veterinarian confirmed, but he wasn’t sure what kind.

Menna-Jones
Biologist Menna Jones of the University of Tasmania has led the charge to thwart the contagious cancer that threatens Tasmanian devils.
University of Tasmania
The following January, Jones spotted tumors blooming on the faces of devils five miles farther down the peninsula — devils she’d known for years. When she returned in April 2002, the blight had marched still farther. By June, when she returned to the neck of Freycinet, she caught only 14 devils, rather than her usual 50. A third of them had tumors.
The disease was spreading. Somehow, it seemed, this cancer had evolved to become contagious.
Now, more than a decade later, the tumor is finally beginning to reveal its tricks. These devils are suffering from a malady so odd many researchers scarcely thought it possible: One devil’s cancer has learned how to survive in other devils’ bodies, and that one tumor is now threatening to wipe out an entire species. This would undermine the Tasmanian ecosystem and likely cause the extinction of many other marsupials that survive only in Tasmania, an island state off the southern coast of mainland Australia.

Fearing such a calamity, the Tasmanian government, working with a network of biologists, has begun quarantining healthy devils in zoos and on isolated islands. If the cancer kills off all other wild devils, this “insurance population” could, in theory, help reboot the species. (See “A Tasmanian Devil Insurance Policy” below.) Meanwhile, some of Jones’ colleagues are trying to decipher how the cancer evolved in hopes of using the information to create a vaccine. But Jones puts better odds on figuring out how to hack evolution itself, so the tumor can coexist with the devil.
The big question is whether researchers can do that before the disease wipes out wild Tasmanian devils altogether.
Unraveling the mystery will do more than save a few furry creatures at the bottom of the world. The tragedy has given researchers a backstage pass to see the evolution of cancer itself. No ordinary cancer can live as long or divide as many times as that of the “immortal devil,” the long-dead animal that spawned the current plague. All cancers are products of natural selection played out on the level of cells rather than species. So understanding the strange tricks that devil facial tumor disease, or DFTD, has evolved to ensure its survival should shed new light on cancer writ large.

http://discovermagazine.com/2014/may/13-the-immortal-devil