Can ants detect cancer using their sense of smell?


Yasmina Kattou

Researchers have implemented a new cancer screening technique using ants. Scientists from CNRS, Sorbonne Paris Nord University, Institut Curie and Inserm have demonstrated the ability of ants to recognize the smell of cancer cells. How does it work ? We answer you.

You knew cancer-sniffing dogs… What if ants were able to smell cancer? Thanks to their highly developed sense of smell, ants have been trained to sniff out certain cancers! A team bringing together scientists from the CNRS, the Sorbonne Paris Nord University, the Institut Curie and Inserm has highlighted the performance of a species of ants, Formica fusca, in this area. The study was published in the journal “iScience”. While it takes between six months and a year to educate a dog, to train an ant is quite simple and quick.

It takes less than an hour for the ant to learn to recognize the smell of cancer cells. Baptiste Piqueret, researcher at the Sorbonne Paris Nord University and author of the study explains that he used what is called the reward system to train the ants. “We put a small container containing cancer cell culture medium, and this small container is placed near a drop of sugar. The ant will come across the reward by chance and when it drinks the reward it will smell and she will sniff her surroundings and she will realize that there is an odor that is specific to cancer cells near the reward.”

The use of urine or saliva

A hundred ants learned to detect ovarian cancer and two types of breast cancer. In 95% of cases the insects succeeded in locating the diseased cells. In reality, how could this happen? Don’t imagine ants crawling over patients’ bodies, reassures the scientist.

“We actually want to use, for example, urine, saliva or sweat only from a person who potentially has cancer. We will not have direct contact between our ants and the patients.” Before evaluating the method on humans, experiments are in progress with the urine of mice suffering from cancer.



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