May 10, 2021
"The wider view of nature is the more powerful one," says
Andreas Mershin, a researcher who stays out of bounds. "Nature is
not divided by a textbook," he continues, and this foundation sets
the tone for his work. He's a physicist who's exploring the
innovative discovery of diseases at their earliest stages, from a
prostate cancer diagnosis to breast cancer, by harnessing the
smelling acuity of dogs.
Listen and learn
Andreas Mershin is a research scientist at the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms. While that department may not seem congruous with researching the latest treatment for prostate cancer, he explains that the physical world doesn’t limit itself to department titles, so why should research? That’s why when he stumbled across two seminal papers on dogs’ abilities to find out more than one different cancer diagnosis by scent, he knew he had a subject worth investigating.
But it’s not as straight forward as just smelling cancer, he
explains. Rather, “think of the molecules of sense that are being
produced by your metabolic pathways as being the sand, and cancer
signatures like footsteps on the sand.” Further, the dogs are able
to generalize to other types of cancer after learning one type. He
says that they are sensing cancer imprints over other molecules
almost as emotion moves through various molecules. They’re also
teaching machines to do this as well, to recognize an “emergent
scent character” of different conditions. Because addressing
certain cancers early can be a matter of life and death, this
research hopes to save lives by identifying someone with, for
example, prostate cancer, and initiating prostate cancer treatment
in the earliest stages.
Listen in for more about this fascinating research.
Visit the Links to know more about his Research:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0245530
https://www.wired.com/story/quest-to-make-robot-smell-cancer-dog/
https://news.mit.edu/2021/disease-detection-device-dogs-0217
Episode also available on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/30PvU9C