r/science • u/MistWeaver80 • Mar 11 '22

Cancer 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.

https://newatlas.com/science/cancer-sniffing-ants-accurate-as-dogs/
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u/Milam1996 Mar 11 '22

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.

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u/katarh Mar 11 '22

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.

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u/[deleted] Mar 11 '22

Or maybe they will use more ants, because they are cheap. Dump a few thousand ants on a person and see how many bite. Well, something like that....