Jo Malone Gives £100,000 to Cancer-Sniffing Device Project

Perfume entrepreneur Jo Malone has donated £100,000 to a charity developing an electronic nose that detects cancer. The charity says the money will speed up the work.

Medical Detection Dogs (MDD), based in Milton Keynes, has spent more than 10 years working with the quantum physicist Dr Andreas Mershin on a device called SniffSpace. It is modelled on the scent-detection abilities of dogs. The charity plans to install one in the coming months so its dogs can sniff more samples in a secure room and generate more "robust data".

Chief executive Dr Claire Guest called the funding "game-changing". The donation followed a demonstration for the charity's patron, Queen Camilla. A prototype had successfully detected prostate cancer from a urine sample.

Malone said: "My sense of smell has given me so much throughout my life. So I have always wanted to find a way of using that world of smell to give something back."

How the electronic nose works

MDD says every disease has an odour, and its dogs have 300 million sensory receptors. Humans have about five million.

Mershin's device, built at RealNose.ai, uses protein odorant receptors to capture scent molecules from a urine sample. Artificial intelligence then finds patterns in how the receptors activate. MDD has helped train that AI.

The prototype is now "sniffing" 500 urine samples from patients at Milton Keynes Hospital. MDD-trained dogs previously identified which of them were cancerous. Once the dataset is complete, researchers can compare its results with the dogs'.

At present the dogs sniff samples arranged in up to eight stands. After each row, trainers must record the data by hand and swap the samples around. SniffSpace will rotate the samples automatically, so more can be sniffed in less time. A team of dogs will now be prepared for training on the equipment.

Mershin said RealNose.ai and MDD aim to set up a formal partnership. Its goal is in vitro diagnostic devices that the NHS could consider for prostate cancer screening and early diagnosis, before trying the same approach on other cancers.

Source: BBC News