Scientists May Have Unraveled the Secret of Aging-Resistance in Naked Mole-Rats

Edit: My best read of the article is as follow, please correct me if I am wrong. RB is retinoblastoma gene which is a well known tumor suppressor gene who's loss of function contributes to oncogenesis. It's main role is to keep a hold of a transcription factor called E2F from trying to go forward and initiating mitosis. INK4a AKA p16 is a CDK inhibitor. It basically puts the breaks on cyclin dependent kinases which help move the cell cycle forward. It is also a tumor suppressor gene. Note that CDKs which (but not p16) are targeted by drugs such as ribociclib. Both of these genes are part of the apoptosis (planned cell death: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/Signal_t...). The theory is that this pathway is way more active in naked mole rats. Where it gets interesting is that up regulation of p16 in particular leads to more activity in the monoamine oxidase pathway that turns serotonin into 5'-HIAA (fun fact, this is monitored for carcinoid syndrome in neuroendocrine tumors). Anyways the breakdown of serotonin leads to a byproduct of H2O2. Hydrogen peroxide leads to general oxidative stress (read DNA damage) and that is a signal for the cell to undergo apoptosis. Thus cell that are senescent and normally don't undergo apoptosis get culled more often. Thus these cells don't get to hang around for a long enough time to undergo aging and oncogensis. Somatic stem cells will fill in the gap. Thus to live longer you gotta kill yourself a little more on the inside.

Edit 2: Oh an one more thing, this is kind of weird but p16 tends to be upregulated by HPV (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3394161/). HeLa cells are in part immortalized by HPV