Cancer learned to find the smell of urine

The authors of a recently published study said Formica fusca ants detect cancerous tumors by

smell. This is all thanks to their strong olfactory receptors. The results were published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

Therefore, scientists propose using them inas biodetectors to distinguish healthy people from patients with abnormal formations. “They can be easily trained, they learn quickly, they are very efficient and they are an extremely low-cost diagnostic method,” explains Patricia D'Ettorre, co-author of the study and a scientist at the Sorbonne University in Paris.

Study lead author Baptiste Piquere, ethologistfrom the Sorbonne Northern University of Paris, and his team of researchers xenografted human breast cancer tumors into mice and allowed them to develop. The scientists then took urine samples from healthy and tumor animals.

Researchers have taught ants to bind scenttumors with a reward by placing a drop of sugar water in front of urine from cancer-affected mice. Insects stopped near the urine of animals with malignant tumors for about 20% longer than before samples of healthy individuals.

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