Jo Malone donates £100k for cancer-detecting 'nose'

A charity says a £100,000 donation made by the perfume entrepreneur Jo Malone will accelerate work on a cancer-detecting electronic nose.

Medical Detection Dogs (MDD), based in Milton Keynes, has been working with the quantum physicist Dr Andreas Mershin for more than 10 years to develop the SniffSpace device, modelled on the scent-detection abilities of dogs.

The charity said it would install a SniffSpace in the coming months, allowing its dogs to sniff more samples in a secure room and generate more "robust data".

Chief executive Dr Claire Guest described the funding as "game-changing".

"This technology gives us an unprecedented opportunity to decode those scent signatures," she said.

The donation was made after the charity's patron, Queen Camilla, was shown how a prototype of the technology successfully detected prostate cancer from a urine sample.

A dog's nose is a highly sensitive chemical detector capable of identifying odours far beyond human and technological capacity.

MDD said that every disease has an odour and that these biochemical changes can be smelt by its canine companions, which have 300 million sensory receptors.

Humans have about five million receptors. If we can smell a teaspoon of sugar in a cup of tea, dogs can sniff out that sugar in a volume of water equivalent to two Olympic-sized swimming pools.

The electronic version of the dog's nose, created by Mershin at RealNose.ai, works on a similar basis, using protein odorant receptors to capture scent molecules from a urine sample to detect prostate cancer.

It then uses artificial intelligence (AI) to make recognisable patterns in the receptors' activation. MDD has been assisting in training this AI element.

Mershin said the charity's facilities and protocols were "cutting edge" and were "inspiring others around the planet".

Other e-noses are being used in food and beverage quality control, environmental monitoring and security and crime prevention.

The prototype electronic nose is currently "sniffing" 500 urine samples provided by patients from Milton Keynes Hospital.

MDD-trained dogs previously correctly identified which of them were cancerous.

The charity said once it had that dataset, researchers could compare its results with those of the dogs.

At the moment, the charity said its dogs sniffed samples, arranged in up to eight stands, for the odours associated with disease.

However, after each row has been sniffed, trainers have to manually record the data - and swap the samples around. SniffSpace will automatically rotate the samples, meaning more can be sniffed in a shorter space of time.

MDD said this would accelerate its ultimate aim of creating an electronic nose that can do what the dogs do, but at scale across the world.

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."

A team of dogs will now be prepared for their training on the equipment.

Mershin added: "RealNose.ai and MDD are focused on establishing a formal partnership aimed at creating in vitro diagnostic medical devices specifically for the NHS to look at as potential solutions to the prostate cancer screening and early diagnosis problems before also trying out the same olfactory approach for other cancers."

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