The early detection of cancer is essential in medical sciences, since the sooner it is diagnosed, the better the chances of recovery for patients. Now, a team of French scientists has found that ants can “reliably” detect tumor signals.
Although this is basic research and more experiments are still needed, the results “are promising,” says lead researcher Baptiste Piqueret. The conclusions are published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
Animal smell is a method that can increase the rate of early detection of cancer, the scientists describe in their article.
cancer biomarkers
Tumor cells are characterized by altered metabolism, producing unique patterns of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that can be used as cancer biomarkers. According to the authors of the study, through olfactory associative learning, animals can be trained to detect these substances.
For example, trained dogs can detect tumors in cell samples or in samples of body odor, but they are not the only ones capable, they report.
Ants formica fusca
Among insects, ants -and especially formica fusca–, have shown a remarkable ability to learn with ecologically relevant odors; ants have a “very fine” sense of smell and can be trained easily and quickly, they say.
For their study, the researchers grafted human breast cancer tumor cells onto mice and found that ants can learn to discriminate the odor of healthy rodents from the odor of tumor-bearing animals.
“We show that ants can detect the presence of cancer in the urine of mice after a brief training”, summarizes Baptiste Piqueret, from the Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, on his Twitter account.
ant training
The team trained, in three different trials for a few minutes, a group of ants to associate the smell of the tumor with a sugar reward.
Then they were left in an arena where there was healthy and tumor urine, but without any reward, and they measured their preferences.
“We found that they spent more time – 20 percent more – next to the learned odor (urine with tumor) than next to the other,” explains Piqueret, now at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology.
Chemical analyzes confirmed that the presence of the tumor modified the odor of the urine, which corroborates the behavioral results.
“Our study shows that ants reliably detect tumor signals in the urine of mice and have the potential to act as effective and cheap cancer biosensors,” the authors state in their article, which already published last year another work carried out in cancer cell samples with similar findings.
However, Piqueret emphasizes, more experiments are necessary before seeing “an oncologist ant”, but these “results are promising”.
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