UB expert Vincent Lynch says animal genes can help us understand human health, from cancer to infertility

BUFFALO, N.Y. — As a kid, all Vincent Lynch wanted to do was hang out by the river near his home, fishing and crabbing and playing in the muck. School, by contrast, was a bore. 

Then he discovered biology — and never looked back. 

Today, as an evolutionary biologist at the University at Buffalo, Lynch studies the genomic history of animals both living and extinct to better understand human health. 

He’s analyzed neanderthal DNA to better understand how women stay pregnant, searched the gorilla genome for clues about infertility in men, and tried to learn elephants’ secret to beating cancer. 

As the latest guest on Driven to Discover, a podcast from University Communications that explores what inspires UB researchers, Lynch tells host Tom Dinki what it means to run a “curiosity-driven” lab, why resurrecting extinct species is a bad idea and where the next step of evolution may take us. 

“I just want to understand how biology works better. Animals look different. Why do they look different? I want to know that answer. But more practically, I recognize that what we're studying can have implications for human health and disease,” Lynch said in the episode. “If we understand why it is that women go into labor, then maybe we can develop an intervention that prevents them from going into labor early. If we understand why some animals are cancer-resistant, maybe we can develop more effective treatment and prevention strategies using that information. While my lab's not going to be the one doing that … I hope the things that we discover can feed into those kinds of studies and eventually give rise to something that improves human health.”

Lynch, PhD, associate professor of biological sciences in the UB College of Arts and Sciences, has analyzed the DNA of various mammals – both primates and nonprimates — to solve some of the mysteries of human pregnancy, including why women go into labor in the first place. Most mammals give birth once their levels of a hormone called progesterone fall, but in humans, progesterone levels never fall.

“So we don't know the signal that initiates labor and delivery in humans,” he said. “It's this very basic aspect of biology that you think that we would understand.”

He’s also shed light on infertility in men — by examining gorilla genes. Gorillas have an unusual social system in which a single male has exclusive mating access to a group of females, so his sperm doesn’t compete with other sperm within the female reproductive tract. This has caused gorillas to have small genitals and a low sperm count. 

Lynch and his team identified over 100 reproductive-related gorilla genes that are often mutated when present in infertile men.

“This gives us some clue to think that maybe they're also related to human infertility,” he said.

Lynch has also researched why some animals that should be at high risk of getting cancer instead rarely get it. 

 “Cancer is the result of an accumulation of mutations that cause a cell to be hyperproliferative. If an animal has many more cells than another animal, that's just more cells in which that mutation can occur, and if an animal lives a really long time, that's a long time for those mutations to occur,” Lynch said. “But then if you look out in the world, there are whales that have billions and billions more cells than humans. And there are Greenland sharks, which we think can live at least 500 years. So why doesn't every whale and Greenland shark have cancer?”

The answers may lie in a tumor suppressor gene called TP53.

“We found that species like elephants … have 20 copies of TP53, while nearly every other animal has only a single copy,” Lynch said. “So we think that some of the genetic changes that give rise to cancer resistance are just getting more of these genes that protect the cell from turning into cancer.”

Lynch has also resurrected wooly mammoth genes to learn more about why the species went extinct, but he doesn’t agree with efforts to revive mammoths and reintroduce them into the wild.

One biotech company is attempting to splice mammoth DNA into the mammoth’s closest living relative, the Asian elephant, and then place them into the arctic in order to stabilize the permafrost. 

“Putting an Asian elephant that looks like a woolly mammoth in the Arctic isn't restoring something that was there to the way it used to be. It's introducing an exotic invasive species into an environment that it's never lived in before,” Lynch said. “We know the consequences of that.”

Lynch likes to say his lab is driven by curiosity. Evolution allows him and his students to focus on a wide range of topics because, well, everything evolves.

“Basically, a student can come to me and say, ‘I really think this thing is interesting,’ and we can find a way to study it because we can turn that question into an evolutionary question,” he said.

Being an evolutionary biologist can also be humbling, Lynch said. Humans only diverged from chimpanzees about 6 million years ago, which represents less than one-tenth of 1% of the history of life on earth.

“Six million years isn't a long time to evolve something entirely new. Basically everything that humans have, other animals have,” he said. “So we're really newcomers on the scene and we're actually not all that special.”

Yet even Lynch can’t help but daydream about the future of evolution. He noted that one of the first books on evolution, “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation,” which actually predates Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species,” proposed that human evolution would continue.

However, Lynch also warned that species can regress.

“Cave fish have lost their eyes because you don't need eyes in a cave,” he said. “So there's no guarantee that we're not going to go extinct, number one, because almost everything goes extinct, and that whatever our future is like, it's a sci-fi one out of the pages of a futuristic novel.”