Specialists involved in the development of insect smell technology at the British company Inscentinel said that bees can be taught by smell to detect certain types of cancer at an early stage of development.
According to the researchers, the smell by which cancer can be diagnosed is found in the human breath, and bees are able to detect odors that are elusive to our sense of smell, due to their special sensitivity to aromas.
Specialists trained insects, first letting them smell a certain smell associated with cancer, and then feeding them sugar. Thus, the association of smell and reward was fixed in insects. If the trained bees detected the necessary smell, then they immediately rush to the place where the aroma was present.
Based on this idea, the Portuguese designer Suzanne Soares created a device thanks to which we can talk about a real breakthrough in oncology. Now, in order to detect cancer in the initial stage, expensive equipment is not required, no lengthy examination procedures and hospital waiting lists. Bees will do all the work for a person. Thanks to their acute instinct, they can detect cancer even before a person gets the first results of the tests.
The tool consists of two glass chambers of different sizes, the smaller of which is inside the larger. The smaller chamber is connected through openings to both the large chamber and the external environment. The doctor simply places several bees in a large chamber, and the patient exhales through the hole. If the air exhaled by them contains volatile substances formed during the life of cancer cells, the bees immediately rush into a smaller chamber.
“The secret of my method is not only the use of the device I designed: before working with bees, they need to develop a conditioned reflex to a specific smell. But it takes no more than 10 minutes, ”says Suzanne.
The idea of diagnosing cancer by human breathing is not new. For example, breathing can actually diagnose bowel cancer. An appropriate test has already been created to capture volatile organic compounds associated with tumor activity. The accuracy of the estimate is 76%.