The Invention of the Artificial Nose

October 1st, 2008

MIT biological engineers have found a way to mass-produce smell receptors in the laboratory. They claim that this will lead the way to the creation of artificial noses. While they don’t necessarily mean that they can build a new nose for people that work, it is a discovery that may have some very useful benefits when put into practical use.

“Smell is perhaps one of the oldest and most primitive senses, but nobody really understands how it works. It still remains a tantalizing enigma,” said Shuguang Zhang, associate director of MIT’s Center for Biomedical Engineering and senior author of a paper on the work appearing recently online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Not to airbrush drug-sniffing and bomb-sniffing dogs as incompetent, because they are far from it, the technology may be able to replace them in some capacity. Basically they would likely create some sort of artificial “nose” that would be able to detect the smells that these dogs are able to be trained for.

“The main barrier to studying smell is that we haven’t been able to make enough receptors and purify them to homogeneity. Now, it’s finally available as a raw material for people to utilize, and should enable many new studies into smell research,” said Brian Cook, who just defended his MIT PhD thesis based on this work.

Medical uses of the project are mentioned of course as well. In future work, the team plans to work with researchers worldwide, including MIT’s Media Lab and Department of Biology, to develop a portable microfluidic device that can identify an array of different odors. Such a device could be used in medicine for the early diagnosis of certain diseases that produce distinctive odors, such as diabetes and lung, bladder and skin cancers, Zhang said. There are also a wide range of industrial applications for such a smell-based biosensing device, he said.