January 25, 2023 – New research suggests that ants may someday help diagnose cancer in humans.
The insects have a highly developed sense of smell, which they use in all areas of their lives – from finding food and a partner to protecting their offspring and communicating.
“Ants have the potential to become a fast, efficient, inexpensive and noninvasive tool for detecting human tumors,” say the authors of a brand new study published within the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
Other animals may be helpful. Trained dogs can detect tumors in cell samples or body odor samples. Mice have been trained to tell apart tumor-affected mice from healthy ones.
In the brand new study, scientists transplanted pieces of human tumors into mice and trained ants to associate the sick rodents' urine with sugar. The ants spent more time near the urine of mice with tumors than near the urine of healthy mice.
“The results are very promising,” said Baptiste Piqueret in The Washington Post. Piqueret is a postdoctoral fellow on the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Germany and co-author of the study. But, he said, “it's important to know that we're still a long way from using it as a routine method for cancer detection.”
In 2020, around 10 million people died of cancer. Survival rates improve with earlier diagnosis. The use of animals akin to ants could prove to be less invasive and dear than current detection methods, the researchers write.