SALT LAKE CITY — Elephants almost never get cancer.

The mystery of why that's so launched an investigation three years ago by a team of Utah scientists. Now they're going public with some answers that might open a whole new front in the war on cancer.

"You would expect elephants — (because) they're so large and so big, they have so many cells in their body dividing all the time to get to be so large — you'd think just by chance alone they'd have to get cancer," said Dr. Joshua Schiffman, the lead scientist on the project.

"Elephants must be protected somehow from developing cancer," said Schiffman, who does research at the Huntsman Cancer Institute and treats cancer patients at Primary Children's Hospital.

"And then we realized we need to figure out what that protection is so that we can help the kids and families that we take care of, some of them that are actually at increased risk for cancer," he said.

The scientific effort involves an unusual team: Utah's Hogle Zoo, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, Primary Children's Hospital and the Huntsman Cancer Institute.

The fascinating results are now published in JAMA, the prestigious, peer-reviewed Journal of the American Medical Association. It now seems at least possible that elephants may play an important role in helping scientists understand cancer in humans, a prospect that clearly delights everyone involved.

"If it were something that Utah's Hogle Zoo was part of, or even helped start, or even helped get the ball rolling in this direction, it would just be an amazing legacy for us to leave," said Hogle Zoo spokeswoman Erica Hansen.

Since the summer of 2012, the pachyderms at Utah's Hogle Zoo have been donating blood for the research project.

"It's something that we do up at the zoo daily anyway, which is get blood draws from our elephants," Hansen said.

Considering how big they are and how long they live, elephants would seem highly vulnerable to cancer. But less than 5 percent of them ever develop the disease. The reason for the discrepancy is what researchers at the Huntsman Cancer Institute are trying to pin down.

"So the blood's going over there and they're able to do some amazing research, and we're hoping to maybe kind of crack the code that is cancer," Hansen said.

"And we're excited to be part of that."

The scientific paper points the figure at a mysterious gene, known as P53, which stood out in previous scientific studies as a factor of interest.

"P53 is the superhero of our body, the guardian of our genome," Schiffman said. "Its job is to fly around our cells and make sure that we don't get cancer."

Most humans have two copies of the P53 gene in each cell. Many cancer victims have one copy. But if P53 genes are weapons against cancer, elephants are packing heat in a big way.

"Elephants have evolved 40 copies of this gene," Schiffman said, expressing astonishment at the apparent arsenal in elephant cells.

His research suggests that those extra P53 genes may be responsible for a very effective frontline defense against cancer by jumping on cells with damaged DNA and stopping them cold by killing them.

Schiffman said the researchers subjected elephant blood to the kind of stresses that sometimes lead to cancer.

"Whenever we exposed any of the blood to anything that would cause DNA damage, like radiation or chemotherapy, the cells self-destructed. It was like cell death or cell suicide. Whereas some of the human cells did that, but not all of them," he said.

The implication is that 40 copies of P53 are far better cancer protectors than the two copies in most humans.

The team also compared the results with tests on blood from young cancer patients, many of whom were born with only one copy of the P53 gene.

"And when we zapped their blood with radiation in the laboratory," Schiffman said, "their cells didn't seem to die at all. They kept dividing, with all of those mutations that we had caused. But the elephant cells, they always completely stopped dividing and self-destructed."

Schiffman said the team strongly suspects P53 is playing a crucial role in protecting elephants.

"So the elephants, we think, because of these extra copies of these protection genes, what they do is they're on the lookout," Schiffman said. "They have extra copies of these policemen all around their body and all in their cells. So anytime a single mutation happens, they're all over it, and they kill that cell … so that it can't pass on the mutation and eventually turn into cancer."

The implications are potentially momentous. Perhaps gene therapy involving P53 could give humans extra protection. Possibly an artificial drug might be developed that mimics the behavior of P53. In the most optimistic scenarios, perhaps elephants can help humans march to victory in the war on cancer.

"You always have to be cautious when you make statements like that," Schiffman said. "We are encouraged by the findings we have so far. We hope that this will actually lead to winning the war on cancer. It's still early and there's still lots of research that needs to be supported and needs to be done before we actually achieve this."

That ongoing research is getting a big shot in the arm from the circus. Ringling Bros. is kicking in $1 million for research in pediatric oncology, half of that aimed directly at Primary Children's Hospital.

For the rest of humanity, it's a matter of waiting — and hoping — the secret of the elephants turns out to be a transferable gift.

Email: hollenhorst@deseretnews.com