Verified on 03/15/2022 by Florine Dergelet, Editor
If some dogs are trained to detect cancer cells in humans, new animals might soon be used for early detection of tumors. French researchers have, in fact, experimented with a species of ant, Formica fusca. The latter were able to differentiate between cancerous and healthy human cells.
Researchers train ants to spot cancer cells
French researchers from the CNRS, Inserm, Sorbonne Paris-Nord University and the Curie Institute have just conducted an unprecedented experiment: they have trained ants to detect cancer cells thanks to their excellent sense of smell.
First, they subjected 36 ants to a sample of human cancer cells. The researchers then used an “associative learning” protocol consisting of associating the samples with a reward (sugar water). The second part of the study aimed to expose the ants to two odors, those of cancerous human cells and those of healthy human cells. In total, the scientists used around 100 Formica fusca ants to identify ovarian cancer cells and two types of breast cancer cells.
According to the results of the experiment published in iScience, ants were able to differentiate odors from the two cell types. In 95% of cases, the ants were indeed targeting human cancer cells.
Towards clinical trials on humans
If it is, for the moment, only an experiment, the researchers plan to evaluate this method ” thanks to clinical tests on a complete human organism “. Preliminary experiments are currently underway on urine samples from mice with cancer. If all the tests prove conclusive, the use of ants might then become a fabulous tool for early detection.
And for good reason, the protocol is simple and inexpensive. Unlike dog training which can take several months, the ants were trained in a very short time. Baptiste Piqueret thus explains that “ three training sessions of less than an hour were enough for them to learn “. As the researchers explained, insects can be easily bred under controlled conditions, they are inexpensive, they have a highly developed olfactory system, and hundreds of individuals can be conditioned with very little testing ».
