They study the smell of ants in search of developing early disease biodetectors

Tumor cells are characterized by specific volatile organic compounds that can be used as cancer biomarkers (Getty)

It is well known that ants have a distinguished sense of smell. In fact, some species are blind and it is the smells that guide them through the world both inside and outside their anthills.

Now, a study carried out by researchers from the Max Planck Institute, in Germany, seeks to go further and intends to use this innate quality of ants for the benefit of science and health. It is that, as they saw, their refined sense of smell could be used to detect tumors early, quickly and cheaply.

In all diseases, and cancer in particular, early detection improves the chances of treatment and recovery. Hence, the authors of the work, whose results were published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, assess the finding as “very promising.”

Early diagnosis can significantly reduce cancer deaths

It is that “tumor cells are characterized by specific volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that can be used as biomarkers of cancer,” as described by the researchers in the publication. And they expanded: “Through olfactory associative learning, animals can be trained to detect these VOCs. Insects like ants have a refined sense of smell and can be easily and quickly trained with olfactory conditioning.”

For the work, they used “the urine of mice with patient-derived xenografts as a stimulus,” and showed that individual ants “can learn to discriminate the odor of healthy mice from that of mice with tumors, and do so after only three odor trials.” conditioning”. “After training, they spend approximately 20% more time near the learned odor than next to the other stimulus. Chemical analyzes confirmed that the presence of the tumor changed the odor of the urine, which supports the behavioral results. Our study demonstrates that ants reliably detect tumor signals in mouse urine and have the potential to act as efficient and inexpensive cancer biosensors.”

Baptiste Piqueret is a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, who studies animal behavior and is one of the co-authors of the work, and considered: “It is important to know that we are far from using them (ants) as a daily way of detect cancer.

For the study, the researchers grafted pieces of a human breast cancer tumor onto mice and trained 35 ants to recognize the urine of tumor-bearing rodents (Getty).

What happens is that the ants, by extending their pair of slender sensory appendages over their heads, detect and display chemical signals to do almost everything: find food, swarm prey, detect colony mates, protect younger members, etc. . This chemical communication helps ants build complex societies of queens and workers that operate so in sync with scent that scientists call some colonies “superorganisms.”

For Federica Pirrone, an associate professor at the University of Milan who was not involved in the ant research but did similar research on dogs’ ability to smell, “the study was well conceived and conducted.”

The specialists agreed that the way cancer is diagnosed today – drawing blood, taking biopsies and performing colonoscopies – is often expensive and invasive. Animal behavior experts envision a world in which doctors turn to species with keen senses to help detect tumors quickly and cheaply.

In this sense, it is known that dogs can smell the presence of cancer in body odor, as shown by previous research, while mice can be trained to discriminate between healthy and tumor-bearing pairs. Nematodes (a type of millimeter-sized worm that lives in soil and in aquatic and marine environments) are attracted to certain organic compounds associated with cancer. Even fruit fly neurons fire in the presence of certain cancer cells.

The researchers found that ants can learn to discriminate the odor of healthy mice from that of mice with tumors (Getty)

But ants, Piqueret suggested, may have an advantage over dogs and other animals that take a long time to train.

Thus, and despite the promise of the finding, the researchers say they have to do much more work before ants or other animals help make a real diagnosis. Scientists need to test for confounding factors such as diet or age, Pirrone said.

“To have real confirmations, we must wait for the next steps,” Pirrone said. Piqueret’s team, meanwhile, plans to test the ability of ants to sniff out cancer markers in the urine of real patients.

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