Diagnostic ants: Realistic or a curiosity?
Whether or not the new research findings could lead to a real tool for diagnosing cancer is difficult to say, says Dr. Moreau. The study only focused on pure cancer cells in a lab and not those growing inside a human body.
Anna Wanda Komorowski, MD, a medical oncologist-hematologist at Northwell Health in New York, found the study interesting and was impressed with how the researchers trained the ants. But she notes more research would be needed to parse out things like how long the ants would remember their training, and how long they could be kept in a lab for testing.
One of the attractive aspects of the research is that if it worked it might be a cheaper alternative to normal lab practices for detecting cancer cells, and possibly useful in some low-income settings where labs do not have access to cell stain technologies used to detect cancer cells.
Another glitch with the study, notes Dr. Komorowski: “The cells we’d expose them to probably would not be the same cells as those used in the study. They exposed the ants to live cell cultures. Usually, we collect material from biopsy and drop it into formaldehyde, which has such a strong odor. So the lab protocol for cancer detection would have to be different. It could be kind of tricky.”
And while ants are cheaper than stains and dyes and formaldehyde, you’d have to hire someone to train the ants – there’d still be a human factor and related costs.
“It would take much more research to figure out cost, and how applicable and reproducible it would be,” Dr. Komorowski says.
And then there’s the question of whether the ants would do their cancer-detecting work in the lab only, or if direct patient interaction might lead to a diagnosis more swiftly.
Ant expert Dr. Moreau adds, “The human body emits many other odors, so the question is whether the ants would be able to ignore all the other scents and focus only on the target scent.”
“But these results are promising,” she continues. “I guess the question is whether a patient would be willing to have trained ants crawl all over their body looking for potential cancer cells.”
A version of this article first appeared on WebMD.com.