The Nose Knows: Disease-Sniffing Dogs (and Humans?)

Can you smell disease? Believe it or not, you can, and pretty reliably at that. The problem is, you aren’t good at describing and quantifying what you smell, and definitely not at “diagnosing.” Aromyx is a company that’s doing something incredibly unique to circumvent this problem, while utilizing scent detection for all it’s worth.

Press play to learn:

• How “smelling” something is actually an act of detecting distinct chemical metabolite signatures from tissues in the body
• By what percentage dogs have been shown to more accurately and sensitively detect prostate cancer than the status quo, FDA-approved test
• How the olfactory system could eventually hold the key to therapeutics for a range of diseases

Olfaction (the sense of smell) has been used for hundreds of years to detect disease—even the ancient Greeks practiced it. Josh Silverman is the CEO of Aromyx, a company that’s taking full advantage of this powerful sense.

So, how are they doing it?

By developing validated clinical assays for diagnosing disease states, using the same scent and taste receptors that are in your nose and tongue. By cloning those receptors and putting them in a format that be used in the lab to measure responses from individual receptors, Aromyx is effectively hijacking the same information that goes from your nose to your brain when you smell or taste something, and putting it in an objective, readable, and quantifiable format.

They’re taking a powerful “subjective” experience, and making it a powerful objective measurement of chemical metabolites which indicate the presence of certain diseases. And, the level of detection is orders of magnitude beyond any electronic sensors or other technology currently in existence.

So far, Aromyx has used this technology to detect prostate cancer, pancreatic cancer, and malaria, and they know that the potential for much wider diagnostic capabilities is well within reach.

Silverman dives into all the details of this and more.

Tune in, and check out https://www.aromyx.com/ to learn more.

Episode also available on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/30PvU9C