Ants have an amazing sense of smell due to the number of olfactory receptors on their antennae despite their lack of noses. As Live Science reported, scientists now have discovered that they can identify the scent of a malignant tumor in just 10 minutes by smelling urine samples.
Dogs have been trained in sniffing cancer in people; and even though using ants for the same purpose is still a long way, the results of the study are encouraging.
Training Ants To Become a Cancer Diagnostic Tool
In the study, titled "Ants Act as Olfactory Bio-detectors of Tumors in Patient-derived Xenograft Mice" published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, scientists trained 35 silky ants (Formica fusca) to find cancerous tumors.
According to The Washington Post, scientists transplanted human breast cancer tumor slices onto mice and trained the 35 ants to "associate urine from the tumor-bearing rodents with sugar." The ants spent 20% more time adjacent to pee samples with malignant tumors than healthy urine once they were placed in a petri dish.
Ethologist Baptiste Piqueret from Sorbonne Paris North University in France who is the principal author of the study told The Washington Post that the ants just basically want to consume sugar.
Dogs and now ants could be swiftly trained to identify irregularities in scents using their sense of smell since tumor cells produce volatile organic compounds (VOCs). But experts think that ants may have an advantage over dogs and other animals, which are time-consuming to train.
Importance of Early Diagnosis
As per the World Health Organization (WHO), cancer is the biggest cause of death in the world, accounting for around one in every six fatalities. Early diagnosis is critical for successful therapy, but existing screening procedures can be intrusive or prohibitively expensive.
Piqueret notes that the research on using ants as a diagnostic tool is still far from practical implementation, although the possibility of it is enticing. In comparison to a carefully controlled laboratory environment with mice as subjects, real-life patients there are several factors that are needed to be considered, such as age, gender, and food, that may alter outcomes.
The next step for researchers is to investigate how small a tumor may be before it goes unnoticed, and the study will be scaled up by collecting urine from patients with certain malignancies, Scientific American reports.
For now, Piqueret said that there is no need to be concerned about ants crawling all over the test subjects. Patients would only need to provide a urine sample that the ants may study in a different lab if the insects are ever used as cancer sniffers in the future.
The findings of the study are important because the earlier cancer is diagnosed, the sooner it may be treated. The researchers are optimistic that cancer-sniffing ants would "serve as effective and economical cancer bio-detectors," as they noted in their report.
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