In a new study, published Wednesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, ants could differentiate between the smell of urine from healthy mice and f

These Ants Were Trained to Sniff Out Cancer

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2023-01-27 16:30:09

In a new study, published Wednesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, ants could differentiate between the smell of urine from healthy mice and from mice with cancerous tumors.

The research serves as a proof of concept demonstrating that ants could someday be used as a fast, inexpensive and noninvasive tool for detecting cancer, the authors write.

“This is an exciting direction,” Debajit Saha, a biomedical engineer at Michigan State University who studies locusts’ ability to detect cancer but was not involved in the new research, tells Scientific American’s Jude Coleman. Using insects is a “new and very powerful approach to disease detection.”

“The results are very promising,” study co-author Baptiste Piqueret, an ethologist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Germany, tells the Washington Post’s Dino Grandoni. But “it’s important to know that we are far from using them as a daily way to detect cancer.”

Finding cancer early can increase people’s chances of survival, but early detection methods can be both invasive and expensive. Instead, scientists have explored harnessing animals’ olfactory systems to screen people for the disease.

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