A young Portuguese designer turned heads at Dutch design week recently with an ingenious glass bowl-type device that uses honey bees to detect cancer from a simple exhalation of breath…
It’s already well-known that honey bees have a powerful sense of smell and can pick up on a huge range of odours – from concealed explosives to telltale chemicals or biomarkers that signal disease – but what Soares, 36, has done is create a simple dual-chamber glass structure in which specially trained bees can reveal, with just one breath, whether a patient is suffering from tuberculosis, diabetes or even certain cancers.
“You train the bees in a sort of Pavlov’s reflex,” says Soares. “You baffle them with the odour you want them to target, then you give them water and sugar a couple of times.
“You repeat the process and they connect that odour with food. The bees are then shepherded into the larger of the two glass chambers. When you breathe into the smaller, connected chamber the bees provide a diagnosis” either by flying towards the source, as they anticipate their sugar reward, or by staying put because they haven’t ‘tracked’ anything.
As Soares explains: “If the bees remain unperturbed, you can breathe easy…”
