Locusts Can Smell Cancer, And It Could Give Us a Brilliant New Way to Save Lives

Scientists have shown that locusts are skilled at distinguishing between healthy and malignant human cells using their sense of smell; this might lead to options for early illness detection, enhancing recovery prospects.

Even better, the insects can distinguish certain cancer cell lines, indicating that it may be possible to identify not just the presence of cancer but also its kind.

There is a ton of promise if we can figure out how to use this skill in medical equipment.

Its findings are encouraging for the early identification of cancer and were published on the pre-print website BioRxiv before peer review.

It has been demonstrated that the locust detection, which is assessed by variations in their brain activity detected by electrodes, is accurate, sensitive, and quick, occurring in only a few milliseconds.

According to Michigan State University microbiologist Christopher Contag, "Early diagnosis [of cancer] is extremely critical, and we should use every conceivable tool to get there, whether it's designed or handed to us by millions of years of natural selection."

"Cancer will be a curable illness if we are successful."

All of this is made possible by the volatile organic chemicals (VOCs) that we breathe out, which are known to be changed in some way by the presence of cancer interfering with particular cells' metabolic activities.

The key is to recognize the shift as it occurs.

Enter the locust, a common insect utilized in scent study by scientists, so we already have a lot of knowledge about these creatures and their sensory abilities.

The team was able to gauge the locusts' reactions to gas samples from various cells using electrodes affixed to their brains, and they were able to create signal profiles that reflected the substances they were smelling.

Indeed, there were differences between the profiles generated in response to cancer cells and healthy cells.

The scientists were able to confirm that the cells did, in fact, smell different to the locusts—most likely because of the airborne VOCs given off—after previously establishing that cells from mouth cancers looked different from normal cells under a microscope and attributing that to shifts in metabolites.

The researchers are certain that other forms of cancer might be recognized in the same way because of the many characteristics of the VOCs generated, even though this particular study was limited to oral tumors.

"We anticipated that the cancer cells would not look like normal ones. But it was remarkable when the bugs could tell three distinct malignancies apart from one another "declares Contag.

When cancer is discovered at stage 4 across all types of cancer, the survival rate is approximately 10–20 percent (when it has spread to other parts of the body). That's a significant difference from malignancies that are discovered at stage 1, where patients have an 80–90% probability of surviving.

The development of "bionic nose" devices that could detect changes in VOCs is already underway, but scientists are still far from producing sensors that are as effective as those that nature has already developed. This finding could provide an alternative course of action for that investigation.

The team's ultimate goal is to reverse engineer the locusts' natural smelling ability in order to "hack" the insect brain and use it for illness detection. Although it is still early, the researchers can already envision a road leading to useful detecting devices.

According to Michigan State University biomedical engineer Debajit Saha, "theoretically, you could breathe through a device and it would be able to identify and discriminate many cancer kinds and even the stage the disease is in."

 at BioRxiv