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[00:00.93] Researchers at Michigan State University recently found that bees’ sense of “smell” is sensitive enough to identify chemical smells of cancer.

[00:16.87] Bees sense chemicals in their environment using antennae, structures on their heads, which serve as “noses” to sense smells.

[00:28.29] The researchers wrote in a study published last month that honeybees can sniff out lung cancer on a patient’s breath.

[00:39.45] Debajit Saha is an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Michigan State University.

[00:49.01] He was part of a team that published the research.

[00:53.79] “Our world is visual. [The] insects’ world is all based on smell, so their sense of smell is very, very good,” Saha said.

[01:07.34] “There is quite a bit of research that shows that when some cancer grows inside our body, our breath actually changes.

[01:17.70] Our research does show that honeybees can detect lung cancer and possibly other diseases based on the smell of those cells.”

[01:29.92] Saha and his team placed bees in small harnesses and attached small wires to their brains.

[01:39.21] The insects were then placed near chemicals that are like the breath of a person with lung cancer.

[01:46.92] The scientists said that the bees could tell the difference between the cancer breath and the laboratory copy of the healthy human breath 93 percent of the time.

[02:00.20] The scientists added that the bees could also tell the difference between different kinds of lung cancer.

[02:07.64] The discovery could help doctors detect many cancers, including lung, breast, head and neck, and colorectal cancers, earlier than other methods.

[02:21.45] Saha says detecting cancers this way would be an improvement.

[02:27.82] “The reason is, many times we detect the cancer late,” when a growth has become too big to control easily.

[02:37.12] But, he added, when cancer starts growing the breath starts changing much earlier.

[02:45.09] He hopes to develop a system that a patient will be able to breathe into and which can be carried around easily.

[02:53.59] This would deliver test results immediately.

[02:58.11] “Hopefully, within the next five years, we'll have something to show that humans can be diagnosed using these insect brain disc sensors,” Saha said.

[03:10.59] Using animals to detect cancer is not a new idea.

[03:15.90] At the Penn Vet Working Dog Center at the University of Pennsylvania, researchers are training dogs to smell some kinds of cancer.

[03:27.86] Cindy Otto is executive director of the Penn Vet Working Dog Center in Philadelphia.

[03:35.83] She said many other animals also have very good senses of smell.

[03:42.99] “But part of what makes dogs so good is that they cooperate with humans, and so, they communicate that information,” she added.

[03:54.42] The dogs are in a program where they live with families and are brought to “work” each day.

[04:01.33] Not all dogs can do this work. Otto said,

[04:05.04] “They need to love it to be engaged.

[04:07.97] And so, it's a really fun game for them.”

[04:12.21] Some researchers say that dogs detect cancer better than machines.

[04:17.79] They note that a dog’s sense of smell is 10,000 to 100,000 times sharper than that of humans.

[04:27.62] Amritha Mallikarjun is another postdoctoral researcher at the center.

[04:34.26] She said dogs are more sensitive to smells than any machines sold today.

[04:41.69] But the scientists hope to create a machine that will identify disease just as well as dogs.

[04:50.46] Otto said doctors in ancient Greece and Rome used odor as a tool to identify disease.

[04:59.49] She hopes the researchers can build on that “and advance the health of not only humans, but dogs and other species as well.”