Honeybees Can Detect Lung Cancer by Scent

Honeybees can identify the faint scents of lung cancer in laboratory settings, including the slight aroma detectable in a patient’s breath.

Leveraging the bees’ remarkable sense of smell, scientists connected living bees’ brains to electrodes, exposed them to various scents under their antennae, and recorded their brain responses. “The difference is striking — like night and day — in whether [a bee] reacts to a chemical,” explains Debajit Saha, a neural engineer at Michigan State University in East Lansing.

Different odors triggered distinct brain activity patterns, creating a sort of neural fingerprint for each scent, according to Saha and his team, who published their findings on June 4 in Biosensors and Bioelectronics. He suggests that one day, honeybees could serve as living sensors in cancer clinics for early disease detection.

While electronic noses (e-noses) and other mechanical odor-sensing devices exist, they don’t match the sensitivity of bees. “Biology can distinguish between very similar mixtures that no engineered sensors can,” Saha explains.

Scent as a Language

Scent plays a crucial role in how many insect species communicate, says Flora Gouzerh, a chemical ecologist at the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development in Montpellier. For insects, “it’s a language,” she notes.

The idea of animals detecting disease by scent isn’t new. In 1989, doctors documented a border collie and a Doberman identifying their owner’s melanoma. More recently, studies have shown that dogs can detect COVID-19 from people’s sweat.

Gouzerh points out that many insects likely have similar abilities; for example, ants can be trained to recognize the scent of cancer cells grown in a lab. However, bees’ capabilities had not been clearly demonstrated until now.

By directly connecting to insects’ neurons, scientists can bypass the need for behavioral training. Instead of spending weeks teaching a dog to react to suspicious smells, they can get immediate results straight from the bee’s brain.

In their experiments, honeybees were restrained using 3-D printed harnesses and wax while researchers performed brain surgery to attach wires to the odor-processing region. A device then delivered air puffs to the bees’ antennae, similar to spritzing perfume samples.

AI Bees Distinguish Between Healthy and Cancerous Breath Scents with Over 93% Accuracy

Each puff could contain a mix of various odors, such as those from healthy individuals’ breath, or a blend that mimics the unique scent profile of lung cancer patients’ breath, which is imperceptible to human noses. By analyzing the electrical signals from the bees’ brains, researchers could differentiate between these synthetic breath types with at least 93% accuracy.

In another experiment, Saha’s team collected air samples from above lung cells grown in the lab. The bees could successfully distinguish between air samples from healthy cells and those from cells with two types of lung cancer: small-cell lung cancer and non-small cell lung cancer.

Ongoing research in Saha’s lab has also demonstrated that bees can detect other trace scents, such as those from perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), commonly known as forever chemicals, which are notoriously difficult to identify in the environment. “That actually blew my mind,” he says. “PFAS are very hard to detect.”

Saha’s team aims to use their bee-based scent sensor to test breath samples from actual cancer patients. The main limitation is that the bees’ brain health deteriorates within a few hours, causing their responses to become unreliable. However, the device provides rapid, real-time results. With just one bee brain, Saha estimates they could theoretically process over 100 samples.

Read the original article on: Science News

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