How honeybees could help diagnose lung cancer [Video]

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — Honeybees can smell lung cancer, researchers at Michigan State University have discovered, which could help create lung cancer tests for early diagnosis.

“Insects have an amazing sense of smell the same way dogs do,” Debajit Saha, an assistant professor in the College of Engineering and MSU’s Institute for Quantitative Health Science and Engineering, said in a Wednesday release.

The team of researchers came up with a way to mimic the breath of someone with lung cancer. The researchers then tested the synthetic breath on 20 bees, by putting them in a 3D-printed harness and attaching electrodes to measure brain signals from the bees. They compared the way the bees smelled the synthetic lung cancer breath with a synthetic healthy breath.

“We pass those odors on to the antenna of the honeybees and recorded the neural signals from their brain,” Saha said in the release. “We see a …