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Baptiste Piqueret, lead author of the study published this week in the journal iScience, tried the experiment with ants. He chose the most common species, Formica fusca, widespread in the northern hemisphere. In the laboratory, the insects were subjected to so-called associative learning protocols where an odor is associated with a reward, in this case a drop of sugar water. These tests were carried out with smells of healthy human cells and cancerous cells (produced by ovarian cancer), to see if the ants might distinguish between them. Then, more finely, with two diseased cells (resulting from breast cancer), to see if the insects made the difference between two subtypes of cancer.
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