Usually, dogs with an amazing sense of smell are used to discover different forms of cancer in human breath, blood and urine, but science has developed, and it has started using small worms to follow the same method and explore lung cancer.
Researchers from Myeonggi University in South Korea conducted laboratory experiments on the roundworm C. elegans, — Caenorhabditis elegans is a free-living transparent nematode about 1 mm in length that lives in temperate soil environments –and it was found that it writhes on its way towards cancer cells by following the trail of smell, according to what was published by Al Arabiya.Net, according to the British newspaper Daily Mail, reports a local Arabic daily.
Based on the results, the researchers suggest that by placing a “worm on a microchip”, doctors can obtain a non-surgical method for detecting and diagnosing lung cancer at an early stage, as an additional method in addition to the currently used methods, which include imaging or biopsy analysis.
The researchers also explain that the new method will be useful in the early stage of the disease because current methods often do not help to detect tumors in their early stages, and similar methods that rely on dogs’ sense of smell are not considered practical for use in laboratories. They also set out for their new study, understanding whether nematodes, which are only 1 mm long, could be used to detect cancer like dogs.
Dr. Shin Sik Choi, the lead researcher on the study, revealed that lung cancer cells have a set of odor molecules that differ from normal cells.It is also known that nematodes or C. elegans, which live in the soil, are attracted or repelled by certain smells, so science came up with the idea that the roundworm can be used to detect lung cancer.
The researchers hope to improve the results by using worms, which have previously been exposed to cancerous cells and have developed a “memory” of specific smell molecules.
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