Six - legged oncologists

Ants were taught to detect cancer by smell

Sergey Vasiliev, Naked Science

The ability of dogs to "diagnose" some diseases has been known for a long time. Due to their extremely acute sense of smell, they can sense volatile substances and odors characteristic of the disease, including Covid-19. However, it is difficult to imagine that doctors began to massively use dogs for diagnosis. At least because it is too difficult and long to raise and train them, and it is expensive and troublesome to maintain them.

Therefore, scientists are testing other, simpler animals, including rodents and even insects, for similar abilities. And a team from the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) turned to ordinary brown forest ants Formica fusca, and they demonstrated excellent sensitivity to volatile organic substances of the tumor. This is described in an article published in the journal iScience (Piqueret et al., Ants detect cancer cells through volatile organic compounds).

Each oncological disease has its own unique composition of volatile substances. In the experiments Baptiste Piqueret and colleagues focused on two forms of breast cancer, growing such cells in vitro, "in vitro". Using a sweet reward, scientists trained ants to identify tumor cells, ignoring healthy ones. The insects learned in just a few attempts, demonstrating the same accuracy as trained dogs.

"In terms of the ability to notice the smell, ants turned out to be no worse than dogs, the most famous "bio-detectors," the authors of the work write. — And in some aspects, ants are superior to dogs, since they require less training time (half an hour instead of 6-12 months) and maintenance funds (honey and frozen insects twice a week). A simple training protocol can be implemented by anyone after a couple of days of training."

According to the researchers, each trained ant can be used up to nine times, after which its abilities begin to degrade — and it is worth moving on to the next insect. However, such a diagnostic method is still far from clinical practice, and the work carried out by French biologists only demonstrates the possibility of such an approach. It is still very, very far from the appearance of diagnostic ants in hospitals and polyclinics.

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