William Atkins
Wednesday, 01 October 2008 00:06
Science -
Health
Page 1 of 2
American biological engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge) have discovered a way to make an artificial nose in order to produce smell receptors in the laboratory--similar to the way a real nose smells.
The October 2008 paper that summarizes their work appears online this week in the journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (
PNAS).
The researchers discovering this odiferous method of replicating how a real nose works include
Shuguang Zhang, associate director of MIT’s Center for Biomedical Engineering (
CBE), along with Liselotte Kaiser, Johanna Graveland-Bikker, a postdoctoral fellow at MIT; visiting graduate students Dirk Steuerwald and Melanie Vanberghem; and Kara Herlihy of General Electric (GE) Healthcare Biacore.
Dr. Zhang states,
"Smell is perhaps one of the oldest and most primitive senses, but nobody really understands how it works. It still remains a tantalizing enigma.” [MIT News Office: “
Sniffing out success”
According to the Zhang team of engineers, their artificial nose is likely to have numerous applications in the future.
They suggest that their “RealNose” could replace drug-sniffing and explosive-sniffing dogs that are used by law enforcement officials, and it could also help doctors detect diseases that have specific smells within the human body such as diabetes and bladder, lung, and skin cancers.
Already, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (
DARPA) has approved further funding for the Zhang team’s “RealNose” Project, which technically is called “microfluidic-integrated transduction.”
How did the MIT team accomplish their goal of creating an artificial nose? Please read page two.
