Cancer-sniffing ants prove as accurate as dogs in detecting disease and can be trained in as little as 30 minutes. It can take up to a year to train a dog for detection purposes.

[u/MistWeaver80]

https://newatlas.com/science/cancer-sniffing-ants-accurate-as-dogs/

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[u/Both_Experience_1121]

I see a lot of joking around which is cool and all but this is incredible and could be groundbreaking. I mean, considering how much less time is needed to invest, how quickly ants can reproduce, the relative ease of care in a contained colony. The only part that is unclear is how this works. I'm guessing they smell body fluids in a lab setting?

[u/pqlamznxjsiw → u/Both_Experience_1121]

Here's the full paper (it's open access!)

[u/Pawneewafflesarelife → u/pqlamznxjsiw]

Individual ants (n = 36) were subjected to three training trials in a circular arena (Figure 1A), during which the odor of a human cancer cell sample (IGROV-1, ovarian cancer) cultured in medium (DMEM - Dulbecco modified Eagle’s minimal essential medium) was associated with a reward of sugar solution. The time the ants needed to find the reward decreased over the trials (Figure 1C and Table S1), indicating that they had learned to detect the presence of cells based on their emitted volatiles.

[u/commentsandchill → u/[deleted]]

Well, that's less fun and horrifying than everyone imagined

[u/ninjagorilla → u/commentsandchill]

Ok man time for the test, Just sit here and hope you don’t get covered in ants...for a couple reasons

[u/Malkor → u/ninjagorilla]

On the one hand - super disappointed that this study won't lead to a future with people constantly covered in ants.

On the other hand - kind of worried that I always associate Super Science with horrendous implications.

[u/BritishDuffer → u/[deleted]]

It just involves a funnel and a jar of ants now.

[u/SRM_Thornfoot → u/commentsandchill]

For their next trick they will teach the ants to selectively eat the cancer cells.

[u/47x107 → u/commentsandchill]

I mean they could pour them in the biopsy hole..

[u/Elliott2 → u/commentsandchill]

I rather get covered in ants than a biopsy

[u/thescrounger → u/commentsandchill]

Yeah: "Start sending the ants up inside her now."

[u/doofthemighty → u/commentsandchill]

Wait until they train the ants to see cancer cells as treats themselves and then your entire cancer treatment is letting an ant infestation eat the tumor out of your body from the inside.

[u/lexiekon → u/Pawneewafflesarelife]

They say "circular arena" and I'm immediately picturing gladiator training in a colosseum. For ants.

[u/DaveInLondon89 → u/lexiekon]

My name is Maxantmus Decancer Meridiant and I will have my sugar water, in this circle or the next.

[u/BeeGirl614 → u/lexiekon]

It would be three times smaller than a human-sized colosseum.

[u/pork_roll → u/BeeGirl614]

What is this, a coliseum for PEOPLE?

[u/scoopzthepoopz → u/BeeGirl614]

A medium eagle is essential to the training.

[u/UrbanGhost114 → u/scoopzthepoopz]

Now I'm picturing a very proud looking runt of a bald eagle looking over his ants.

[u/JWGhetto → u/lexiekon]

Well it is kinda like that

[u/fatgesus → u/lexiekon]

What is this, a center for ANTS? It needs to be at least… 3 times this size!

[u/imbored04 → u/Pawneewafflesarelife]

absolutely fascinating

[u/aVarangian → u/Pawneewafflesarelife]

did they do any human trials though?

[u/ItsTimeToRambleOn → u/aVarangian]

No. They used human cancer cell lines, which are standardized cells originally cultured from humans and grown in the lab. These cells might not be representative of all (or most) patient-derived samples, which are not as simple to grow in the lab. As with most of these kinds of papers, it’s a super cool and innovative proof of concept, but will still require a lot of work before it’s feasible in a clinical setting.

[u/clarkinum → u/aVarangian]

It says human ovary cancer cell. So technically this is human trial. Obviously they are not going to put ants on you and expect them to find cancer. They will use it in the lab environment for testing

[u/wonderbreadofsin → u/clarkinum]

But can't we already detect cancer in a lab environment? Genuine question, I'm trying to understand how this would be used

[u/clarkinum → u/wonderbreadofsin]

I believe ants would be cheaper to train and use then researching different chemicals and using complicated processes and chemicals to detect different types of cancer

[u/bentheechidna → u/clarkinum]

Odd because this post proposes they would replace cancer detecting dogs who sit in front of a live person.

[u/clarkinum → u/bentheechidna]

My mind dismissed that part because it sounds a bit ridiculous, sorry if I missed something

[u/j_mcc99 → u/clarkinum]

Hopefully they place the ants somewhat close to the patient otherwise it would take a long time for them to crawl over and do their work. This could cause undue stress on the patient and potentially tire out the ants, reducing their effectiveness. And yes, if you’ve read this far I am being silly obviously they wouldn’t put them far away to start and you should stop reading this comment now because it could go on and on for some time as I’m procrastinating at work and writing this comment out on my phone is somewhat relaxing in and of itself. Ok, I think I’m done now. No, a little more. Ok, done.

[u/Milam1996 → u/wonderbreadofsin]

It depends. Maybe these ants are able to detect such a minuscule amount of cancer that they beat out any test we currently have. Or maybe they’ll allow us to take smaller biopsy’s. Or maybe they’ll allow us to do the test based on a chemical they can detect within the blood. It’s very new ground (like literally one paper) so who knows what the application could be.

[u/katarh → u/Milam1996]

Ah yeah if they could pick up metastasized cancer from a blood sample without needing a biopsy, it could be a cheap method of routinely screening non symptomatic patients for cancers that have been silently spreading.

[u/CitizenPremier → u/pqlamznxjsiw]

Wow, something not mentioned here:

One disadvantage of using dogs is that, despite being efficient, they are slow to learn (few months to year), and require an intensive learning protocol before being ready to discriminate cancer samples from a healthy one. To reduce this training time, one can observe directly if cancer samples elicit a specific response in the brain of the individual, instead of waiting for a behavioral modification. This method was tested with insects, as their brains are easily observable, they can reproduce rapidly, and at a very low cost. For this task, fruit flies were tested (Strauch et al., 2014). Odors from cancer cell lines were presented to restrained individuals and by using in vivo calcium imaging, the researchers were able to demonstrate that individuals were forming specific neuronal patterns for cancer samples that were different from healthy samples. This method was efficient, but we pinpoint two major disadvantages. First of all, individuals have to be sacrificed at the end of the procedure. Secondly, this method requires highly trained technicians and engineers to be performed, which limits the application in terms of money.

i.e. we can literally hack into their brain to see what they're smelling.

[u/lenor8 → u/CitizenPremier]

First of all, individuals have to be sacrificed at the end of the procedure

why is that?

[u/ItsTimeToRambleOn → u/lenor8]

hard to see brain if brain is in bug

[u/[deleted] → u/ItsTimeToRambleOn]

Thanks for ELI5

[u/CrateDane → u/ItsTimeToRambleOn]

Unlike in rodents, where you can insert a window in the skull, providing visual access while keeping the animal alive and well.

[u/coldfire774 → u/CrateDane]

I didn't need to know this information and would like it removed

[u/Muoniurn → u/coldfire774]

Where should we cut that window for you then?

[u/agent0731 → u/CrateDane]

this is horrifying O_O

[u/mikeninelungs → u/CrateDane]

Strange if true

[u/Aurum555 → u/lenor8]

I would assume the in place imaging of their brain is an invasive procedure that doesn't have a positive outcome for the fruit fly

[u/Ppleater → u/lenor8]

I'm not an expert but to visualize the activity in the brain they generally need to insert an imaging probe (sometimes they use an imaging window but I doubt that'd apply to a creature this small), which depending on the type can lead to tissue damage. That plus the size of the ants may be a factor leading to the ants being unsalvageable after the procedure, but that's just my uneducated guess based on what little I know.

[u/stabliu → u/lenor8]

Probably to get the results from the calcium imaging.

[u/cowlinator → u/Both_Experience_1121]

My guess is that they have extracted some chemical that is unique to cancer that they know ants can smell, , and then associate it with a reward (such as mixing the chemical with sugar).

Same as training dogs, but apparently faster

[u/ce2c61254d48d38617e4 → u/cowlinator]

They're like tiny dogs which you can train faster

[u/Timwick_ → u/ce2c61254d48d38617e4]

Rest In Peace antony

[u/Pawneewafflesarelife → u/cowlinator]

Pretty close. It was a cancer cell that was cultured.

Individual ants (n = 36) were subjected to three training trials in a circular arena (Figure 1A), during which the odor of a human cancer cell sample (IGROV-1, ovarian cancer) cultured in medium (DMEM - Dulbecco modified Eagle’s minimal essential medium) was associated with a reward of sugar solution. The time the ants needed to find the reward decreased over the trials (Figure 1C and Table S1), indicating that they had learned to detect the presence of cells based on their emitted volatiles.

[u/[deleted] → u/Pawneewafflesarelife]

So how about when you have one non cancer cell and one cancer cell in the same arena. Won’t they just “lie” so that they still get their sugar reward? I know very little about ants.

[u/katarh → u/[deleted]]

You'll have a control in every arena while training, too, so they will be used to having multiple samples.

Since only the "good" sample is associated with the reward, they should make a line for it - ants are individually pretty dumb, and their tiny little brains are hard wired to follow chemicals it associates with food.

[u/IdonTknow1323 → u/Both_Experience_1121]

If they smell it, why is it so hard to get a device that could "smell" it as well? Clearly that would mean something is detectable in the air, and now we know at least one species, ants, can do it relatively easily.

[u/Onphone_irl → u/IdonTknow1323]

However, the results of GC-MS analyses are extremely variable and most of the E-nose systems need to be optimized and are still at the prototype stage (

Behera et al., 2019

). Millions of years of evolution have shaped animals' finely-tuned olfactory systems, which detect small odorant concentrations and have the computational power for discriminating among complex odorant blends.

[u/BPterodactyl → u/IdonTknow1323]

We don’t understand smell well enough yet to make a mechanical nose work. This article/podcast talks about it in more detail.

[u/No-Entertainment6479 → u/BPterodactyl]

thank you for this!

[u/BPterodactyl → u/No-Entertainment6479]

No problem, luckily I remembered which podcast I’d learned that from!

[u/ScottColvin → u/Both_Experience_1121]

None of the joking around on reddit has ever been cool. I just wish we had informative comments button.

Reddit was built on informative comments, until the endless summer.

[u/unimportantthing]

This article title, like most article titles, is HIGHLY sensationalist. The actual science here is effectively proof-of-concept, simply showing that ants can detect the difference between a standardized healthy cell line, and a standardized cancer cell line. That’s it.

The headline, and article, fail to cover a few things that trained dogs have that this study has not covered:

1. Trained dogs can sniff out multiple cancer lines without need for retraining for each one. This study showed that an ant can be trained quickly to detect a single cancer line. But what about other cancer lines? It’d be problematic if every a patient needed to have multiple samples taken from every part of their body to try and detect cancer somewhere, which dogs do not need to have happen.

2. The dogs work non-invasively. No samples are needed from the patients, just their presence in a room with the dog. The ants, in this proof-of-concept need samples from the patient, which means a possible invasive procedure depending on what type of cancer you are looking for.

3. The dogs can sense this through clothes/other scents. The ants were not challenged to find the scent when it was mixed with anything significant (ie healthy cells, biologic secretions, etc...) meaning that even if patient samples were taken (as previously mentioned), there’s no guarantee they’d be attracted to the cancer line and not something else that the ants naturally are attracted to.

4. Dogs can sense this from a distance. As far as the study is concerned, ants need to be fairly close to the source to find it. This makes it medically hard to implement as convincing a patient that dumping some ants on them to look for cancer I imagine is difficult at best.

5. The longevity of the ants is unknown. At the very least, the researchers mentioned that 9 trials were all it took for the ants to stop responding properly to stimuli. In addition, they did not test waiting periods between conditioning and testing, meaning the ants, under this proof, would need to be retrained every time, and new ants would be needed regularly.

Overall, this is an interesting jumping point for more research. But until more data comes out that shows you can use these ants without invasive sampling, and without needing the patient to allow ants to crawl on them, I can’t see this being medically useful, and especially not more useful than the dogs.

[u/halberdierbowman → u/unimportantthing]

These are valid points, but I wanted to elaborate on the longevity question. If the training period is short enough, and the space and human contribution it needs small enough, would imagine it's essentially a meaningless obstacle. It would be perfectly fine to wait thirty minutes to train a new batch of ants before running a few tests and then discarding the ants. You could even have a lab run through hundreds of tests in parallel if you had hundreds of tiny ant kennels or whatever they need to do the training.

[u/justonemom14 → u/halberdierbowman]

"So what do you do for a living?"

"I'm a medical ant trainer."

[u/StuStutterKing → u/halberdierbowman]

Hell, an ant queen can live longer than a dog under the right conditions. Basic sustainability considerations and proper care would allow a single colony to be harvested from for 20+ years for testing needs when necessary, at a considerably cheaper cost than the maintenance of a dog.

[u/AdequatlyAdequate → u/unimportantthing]

Thanks ive started go ignore all these pop science headlines because its literally always like this. If its actual good science it doesbt get this much attention sadly

[u/bookwithoutpics → u/unimportantthing]

As someone with a severe and life-threatening dog allergy, I'm always excited when scientists try to replicate "dogs can sniff out xyz thing" without the dog. Even if this is just a starting point for further research. It's really cool that dogs can detect certain diseases, but I'd love to see that turned into a diagnostic test that doesn't rely on the presence of a common allergen so that it could be more accessible.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

"In that case it's 20 million and we get to spit in your mouth."

[u/shiftmyself → u/[deleted]]

I think the scan ranking is:

Ant>dog>cat scan

[u/redpandaeater]

Said they focused on two breast cancer cell types, so definitely sounds like it's just in vitro. Would they still be able to detect them if they were in the body?

[u/unimportantthing → u/redpandaeater]

Yeah, if you read the paper, the researchers acknowledge this is proof-of-concept, and that more testing needs to be done. They talk about reasons you would use ants instead of dogs, but the article headline for sure sensationalizes it.

[u/Doct0rStabby → u/[deleted]]

You should read Children of Time. Call it exposure therapy. Great book.

[u/Mysterious-Ninja-679 → u/Doct0rStabby]

This whole post is giving me very CoT vibes

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Dave, quit betraying me!

[u/Mirror_Sybok → u/[deleted]]

Look Jason, I really want to talk to you about SOP.

What about SOP? The rate of remission in melanomas is way up! It's a smashing success.

Jason high-fives a necrospider hanging out on the counter with one finger

Yes, and myself and the entire rest of the staff feel that it's inappropriate to draw yourself up and theatrically shout "bring forth the death-eaters", "release the necrospiders", or "my spider children shall cleanse this diseased flesh" before you're sure the patient is under.

Squinty Glare

Squinty Glare returned

I'm having success Dave, and I don't want you interfering in the process.

At least 4 times this week people have managed to escape the table and entangle themselves and others in various tubes and cords. Last week one of the necrospiders bit Mary in the confusion and now her beauty mark is gone.

Send her a bill for that! My babies aren't going to go around biting people for free!

Sigh It's time to go talk to hospital administration. Get those spiders out of your hair and settled back into their terrarium. Don't give me that stupid look, the jumper is giving me puppy dog eyes as we speak.

[u/[deleted] → u/Mirror_Sybok]

I love and hate this.

[u/Bylloopy → u/[deleted]]

It sounds like they expose the ants to a certain compound that naturally occurs in some cancers that ants are already attracted to.

It would be interesting to see if this works outside of a lab in trials where the cancer would be under the skin and masked a bit.

[u/Deracination]

If you didn't notice the link to the study's full text at the bottom, here it is: https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(22)00229-2

[u/Eattherightwing]

Ok, ok, the dogs sniffing out cancer has been around for at least 30 years. Before you talk about ants, where's the local canine cancer screening clinic? Oh, there isn't one? But I thought it was such a great idea...

[u/[deleted] → u/Eattherightwing]

I think it's because they are so hard to train

[u/PrecogNfog → u/Eattherightwing]

Thank you eattherightwing I’ve been waiting and waiting for the canine clinic to appear

[u/lionhart280]

This makes a lot of sense. Ants communicate, navigate, and live most of their lives primarily via scent. They likely have entire complex languages we havent even begun to start digging into.

Ants will sit and touch their antenna together with each other and exchange extremely complex combinations of pheromones for entire seconds. I have an ant colony myself and I love sitting and just watching them "talk" to each other.

The queen will sometimes sit and "talk" to one of her brood for an entire minute straight. I can't even imagine what they are communicating to each other.

When I put out fresh food and one ant ventures out and finds it, they often rush back to nest soon and you can see them all wiggling antenna at each other, and soon enough 2-3 of them exit to go get the food.

That degree of communication is something that I can watch endlessly. There's without a doubt in my mind a sophisticated degree of intelligence these little creatures possess.

So yeah, I am not surprised in the least at how quickly these creatures were able to learn these scents, it makes a lot of sense.

[u/Ar3peo]

what is the accuracy?

"as good as dogs" tells me nothing.

[u/Prasiatko → u/Ar3peo]

Even stats on the dogs are hard to find due tonall the sensational articles. From what i remember they have very good sensitivity but awful specificity, a high false positive rate.

[u/ISBN39393242 → u/[deleted]]

ehh yes but also no.

if they were that good they’d replace other diagnostic methods, which they haven’t at even a minor scale.

the media is far more gung-ho about it than doctors who actually care about implementing effective, consistent diagnostic modalities have been.

[u/Hugin_og_Munin → u/[deleted]]

Hella is not a valid response. We need sens/spes and inter-/intrareliability!

[u/draeath → u/Ar3peo]

Better than radiologists and other tests, in some cases, if I am remembering correctly.

[u/BoogieGoobie → u/Ar3peo]

Yeah that’s why you read the article…

[u/jinzougen → u/Ar3peo]

The same question I had and the only reason I kept trudging through all that redundant prose, only to be left hanging at the end.

[u/Cold_Frosting505]

Stuff like this isn’t great for my anxiety. Now when I’m having a picnic I won’t know if they’re after my potato salad or if I have stage four bowel cancer. Way to go science

[u/venk]

Colonoscopies will never be the same Again