Insects can smell the differences between healthy and cancer cells, which opens the door to new ways to detect disease in humans
Locusts could be used to detect cancer in its early stages, scientists have revealed, according to the Mirror.
Insects can smell the differences between healthy and cancerous cells, which opens the door to new ways of detecting disease in humans.
Their brains send out different chemical sensors when they smell cancer cells, which researchers could harness to create new detection machines.
All these machines would need is a sample of a patient’s breath, which is passed through a small device that mimics the sense of smell of these insects.
University of Michigan Assistant Professor of Biomedicine Debajit Saha said: “In theory, you could breathe through a device and it would be able to detect multiple types of cancer, even what stage the disease is at».
Scientists have been working on similar devices for more than 15 years, but so far they have not come up with a result. If they succeed, it could have a huge impact on cancer survival rates around the world by speeding up detection times.
The researchers decided to try using grasshoppers to detect cancer cells, as they have been used by scientists for decades in similar experiments.
“Early detection is so important, and we should use every possible tool to achieve this, whether it is engineered or provided to us by millions of years of natural selection. If we succeed, cancer will be a curable disease“, added the professor.
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