(News Nation) — Bad breath can say a lot about a person, but soon honeybees may be able to smell your breath and tell if you have lung cancer.
The researchers Michigan State University They discovered that honeybees can detect chemicals in human breath that are linked to lung cancer.
“Insects, like dogs, have an incredible sense of smell,” Devajit Saha, an assistant professor in Michigan State University’s Institute for Quantitative Health Sciences and Engineering, said in a university release.
Saha’s team developed a “recipe” for a synthetic breath mixture that combined six different compounds in different concentrations: one version replicated the chemical makeup of healthy human breath, and another the breath of a lung cancer patient.
The researchers restrained live bees in special harnesses and attached tiny electrodes to the bees’ brains to measure changes in their brain signals.
“We exposed the odor to the bees’ antennae and recorded neural signals from their brains,” Saha said. “We saw changes in the bees’ neural firing responses.”
The researchers detected several different neurons firing in the bees’ brains and showed clear differences when they smelled the breath of lung cancer patients versus healthy breath.
The research will be used to develop a sensor that mimics the bee’s brain and is then placed into a device that patients breathe into, which will report in real time whether cancer-causing chemicals are present.
Lung cancer is the second most common cancer in the United States after prostate cancer in men and breast cancer in women. American Cancer Society It is estimated that more than 234,000 new cases of lung cancer will be discovered this year, and approximately 125,000 people will die from the disease.
