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Insects Might Be the Key to Detecting Cancer
Some insects can “smell” cancerous cells, possibly leading to new devices for early detection.
Nothing beats a natural nose. Since the early 1980s, researchers have been trying to develop electronic noses, devices that can detect unique airborne chemical signatures, yet anything on the market or even in the lab can’t compete with evolution. Anything produced by humans just can’t match the complexity produced by billions of years of natural selection. So, researchers from Michigan State University have turned to insect noses in their attempt to create a device to detect cancer earlier than ever before.
In a new study published in the journal bioRxiv, the researchers successfully used the brains and antennae of locusts to detect cancer. It’s thought that cancerous cells change the host’s metabolic process, which alters the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the breath, and locusts’ neurophysiology seems particularly sensitive to these changes. By connecting the locusts’ brains and antennae to an electrophysiology platform and using the computational rules to translate between neurons and circuitry, they saw that locusts responded differently to the VOCs from cancerous cells. In fact, the locusts were so sensitive that they could also tell the difference between types of cancer.
