The naked mole-rat (heterocephalus glaber) is a burrowing rodent native to East Africa. It has a bizarre appearance, looking like an elongated cocktail sausage with large protruding teeth. It can live for over 30 years and is highly cancer-resistant, with only a few cases ever observed in captive animals. Researchers have been intrigued by naked mole-rat as a model organism across a range of research fields due to its cancer resistance, healthy ageing and unusual pain phenotype.
Learn more about this fascinating creature and the insights it may offer to our exploration and understanding of cancer.
Dr Ewan St John Smith
Dr Ewan St John Smith studied pharmacology at the University of Bath, before conducting a PhD at the University of Cambridge. During this time, he became interested in how sensory neurones are activated by acid which led him to conduct a postdoc in Professor Gary Lewin’s Lab at the Max-Delbrück Centre, Berlin. Here, he began working on pain peculiarities of the naked mole-rat.
In 2013, Dr St John Smith was appointed to a Lectureship in Pharmacology at the University of Cambridge where he focused on understanding the molecular basis of nociception using both mice and naked mole-rats as model systems, as well as investigating the cancer resistance and healthy ageing of naked mole-rats.
