Mosquitoes bite cancer patients, but never get cancer: what can we learn? digestive enzymes and host-specificity as natural barriers

Mosquitoes, despite their frequent exposure to various mammalian blood components, including potentially aberrant cells, have never been reported to develop cancer-like conditions. This paper proposes a speculative biological model suggesting that the mosquito’s digestive and immune systems could naturally prevent the survival of malignant cells, offering inspiration for bioinspired cancer-therapeutic design. This perspective explores how the mosquito midgut creates an inhospitable environment through rapid pH shifts, potent digestive enzymes, and oxidative stress, leading to potential degradation of mammalian cancer cells. In parallel, the mosquito’s innate immune system, including antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), hemocyte activity, melanization, and reactive oxygen species (ROS), further neutralizes non-self-cellular threats with speed and precision.Together, these digestive and immune mechanisms offer valuable inspiration for cancer therapy design. This perspective posits that the mosquito’s intrinsic mechanisms for xenobiotic clearance and immune defense against diverse biological threats offer a unique, yet underexplored, biomimetic blueprint for overcoming key challenges in contemporary oncology, particularly drug resistance and the need for precision targeting. Emerging strategies such as ROS-based treatments, protease-mimetic systems, and AMP-engineered platforms reflect the potential of translating mosquito-derived mechanisms and their barriers into biomedical applications and drug delivery systems strategies. This article underscores how the mosquito’s natural defenses may guide the development of novel, bioinspired approaches to improve cancer treatment. Even though this idea remains speculative with limited direct experimental proof, investigating these mechanisms may offer inspiration for the design of bioinspired cancer therapies in the future