Scientific Research: Scientists have been looking for an easy way to detect cancer for a long time. You will be happy to know that now ants can detect cancer.
Ants Can Detect Cancer: What’s wrong with no nose, ants can detect different types of cancer by smelling urine
Liquid Biopsy News: Risk of death increases by 10% due to delay in cancer treatment every month. That’s why scientists have been looking for a simple way to detect it for a long time. You will be happy to know that now ants can detect cancer. That is, ants can detect diseases through blood, sweat or urine. Also called liquid biopsy. Due to the presence of cancer in the body, different types of chemicals are released from the body. These chemicals, called volatile organic compounds, are excreted in sweat and urine. Now the ants will detect if someone has cancer by smelling this chemical.
Ants Can Detect Cancer :
According to the scientists, the researchers used 70 ants for the new study. These ants belong to the species Formica fusca. Which is found in abundance in Europe and South Asia. These ants can detect cancer to a large extent without any cost and damage to the body. Ants are exposed to mice’s urine. On one side was the urine of healthy mice and on the other was the urine of mice with tumors. The study found that after three trials, the ants were able to distinguish between the urine of tumor-bearing mice and the urine of healthy mice. This is called liquid biopsy. For nearly a decade, oncologists have been searching for a biopsy method that can detect cancer from body fluids such as blood or sweat.
Scientists also reported that dogs have previously been used to detect cancer cells. But now it appears that ants are more suitable than them for this task. But training an ant is much less time consuming than training a dog. It took 6 months to train the dog. There training can be given in 10 minutes in case of ants. Cancer has been tested on ants before. A study a few years ago claimed that a chemical found in ants increased the effectiveness of cancer drugs by 50 times. This chemical is also found in a plant called ‘scorpion grass’.
