ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2023
Ants act as olfactory bio-detectors of tumours in patient-derived xenograft mice.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed, 7 citations in OpenAlex.
- Volatile Organic Compounds in Biological Matrices as a Sensitive Weapon in Cancer Diagnosis.Pharmaceuticals (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Non-Invasive Detection of Tumors by Volatile Organic Compounds in Urine.Biomedicines · 2025Review
- Ants act as olfactory bio-detectors of tumours in patient-derived xenograft mice.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 4 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Early detection of cancer is critical in medical sciences, as the sooner a cancer is diagnosed, the higher are the chances of recovery. Tumour cells are characterized by specific volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that can be used as cancer biomarkers. Through olfactory associative learning, animals can be trained to detect these VOCs. Insects such as ants have a refined sense of smell, and can be easily and rapidly trained with olfactory conditioning. Using urine from patient-derived xenograft mice as stimulus, we demonstrate that individual ants can learn to discriminate the odour of healthy mice from that of tumour-bearing mice and do so after only three conditioning trials. After training, they spend approximately 20% more time in the vicinity of the learned odour than beside the other stimulus. Chemical analyses confirmed that the presence of the tumour changed the urine odour, supporting the behavioural results. Our study demonstrates that ants reliably detect tumour cues in mice urine and have the potential to act as efficient and inexpensive cancer bio-detectors.
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Registered trials
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