Ants can be trained to detect cancer in urine, according to a new study.
Although ant sniffing is far from being used as a diagnostic tool in humans, the results are encouraging, the researchers said.
Car ants having no nose, they use olfactory receptors on their antennae to help them find food or sniff out potential mates. For the study, published January 25 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (opens in a new tab)scientists have trained nearly three dozen silky ants (Formica fusca) to use these acute olfactory receptors for a different task: finding tumours.
In a lab, scientists grafted breast slices cancer tumors from human samples to mice and taught the 35 insects to “associate the urine of tumor-bearing rodents with sugar,” according to Le Washington Post (opens in a new tab). When placed in a petri dish, ants spent 20% longer next to urine samples containing cancerous tumors compared to healthy urine, according to the study.
“They just want to eat sugar” Baptiste Piqueret (opens in a new tab)The study’s lead author and an ethologist at Sorbonne Paris Nord University in France, told the Washington Post.
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Because the tumor cells contain volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that researchers can use as cancer biomarkers, animals such as dogs – and now ants – can be quickly trained to detect these anomalies through their sense of smell. However, the researchers believe that the ants “may have the advantage over dogs and other animals that are [more] plenty of time to train,” according to the Washington Post.
This is important because the earlier the cancer is detected, the sooner treatment can begin. The researchers hope that cancer-sniffing ants have the potential “to act as efficient and inexpensive cancer bio-detectors,” they wrote in their study.
“The results are very promising,” Piqueret said. However, he warned that “it is important to know that we are far from using them as an everyday means of detecting cancer”.
