Are Ants the Future of Cancer Detection?

Cancer diagnosis is frightening, invasive, time-consuming, and expensive. And more than 1.6 million people get that cancer diagnosis every year in the United States. That’s a lot of biopsies and a lot of looking at cells under highly sensitive microscopes.. But what if detecting cancer in those samples was as simple as taking a whiff?We know some animals, like dogs and mice, have very sensitive noses that can sniff out disease. Inspired by those studies, French scientists decided to explore whether much smaller creatures that are known for their olfactory prowess could do the same: ants.“Using olfaction to detect diseases is not a novel idea,” says Baptiste Piqueret, PhD, a researcher at Sorbonne Paris Nord University and lead author of
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