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We never stop learn from insects. In this case give it ants, as a cancer detective. They are in fact the protagonists of a study published on January 25 in the scientific journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: sesecond results would be able to perceive the presence of certain volatile substances – produced due to the altered cellular metabolism that tumors induce – in the urine of cancerous mice.
I study
The authors have transplanted into mice a particularly aggressive type of human tumor that affects the breast and they let it grow. Then they “asked” the ants to distinguish urine samples taken from healthy mice (as a negative control) from that deriving from mice with cancer. But how ants train to “sniff” the substances, or rather, to distinguish their smell and then to communicate it to us? Simple, with water and sugar. In fact, the researchers placed droplets of water and sugar in correspondence with the urine samples of sick mice so that the ants would associate them with this small reward. In technical jargon they are called conditioning tests and they are real training sessionswhich have been repeated three times to each animal involved in the experiment. Next, the scientists exposed the same ants to two different urine samples (the control one and the one ‘altered’ by the tumor), this time without adding the sugar water. The ants would remained on average about 20% more time in front of the sample deriving from the diseased mouselooking for the reward. Thanks to specific chemical analyses, the scientists then confirmed the presence of the substances that give the characteristic odor in the samples that the ants (unknowingly) recognized as positive for the tumour.
What did we know until today
Already in 2022 the same research group had shown that ants were capable of distinguishalways from the smell cancer cells from healthy cells. In that case, however, it was cells grown up in vitroAnd not of samples from live animals, cancer patients, as in the present study. This is how science advances, in “small”, tireless steps, a bit like the protagonists of this story. And, the authors recall in the conclusions of their article, more steps will be needed before being able to use this method in clinical practice: in fact, in real life there are many more variables to take into account, compared to those considered in this study. First of all, it will be necessary validate this type of screening using samples of human origin resulting from patients of different ages, suffering from different types of cancer, leading different lifestyles, etc. At the same time, according to the authors, these insects appear to have the potential to become a useful and cost-effective screening tool non invasive. They are in fact relatively simple to maintain and also learn quickly: approx 10 minutes would have been enough to train each ant to become an effective “detective”.
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