This discovery is important because the earlier cancer is detected, the sooner treatment can be started.
The researchers hope that cancer-sniffing ants have the potential “to act as efficient and inexpensive cancer bio-detectors,” they wrote in their study.
“The results are very promising,” said Baptiste Piqueret. However, he cautioned that “it is important to recognize that we are far from using it as an everyday way to detect cancer”.
“This study was well structured and conducted,” said Federica Pirrone, a researcher at the University of Milan in Spain who has studied dog olfaction but was not involved with the study. Smithsonian MagazineFriday (27/1/2023).
Interestingly, ants are relatively easy to train and it only takes three trials totaling about ten minutes to get the ants to associate the smell of cancer.
However, more research and work needs to be done to show that ants can actually be used for human patients.
“Food, gender, and age of the patient can affect the smell of urine,” said Piqueret.
Future studies should also investigate whether ants trained to detect one type of cancer can generalize to the ability to detect other types of cancer, the authors wrote in their study.
