SCENT: Scanning COVID-19 by Electronic Nose Technology

Description:
The Scanning for Covid-19 by Electronic Nose Technology (SCENT) program was issued in response to the COVID public health emergency as part of the NIH Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics-Radical (RADx-rad) initiative. Specifically, this program supports the development of portable sensing devices to detect volatile organic compounds (VOCs, i.e., scents or odors) emanating from skin or exhaled breath. RADx-rad SCENT seeks to advance novel biosensing technologies that are innovative, safe, and effective using integrated artificial intelligent, pattern recognition and machine learning systems that would make it possible for the detection, diagnosis, prediction, and monitoring of COVID-19 in clinical, community and everyday settings. A summary will be presented on the resulting technologies supported by this initiative, the data generated differentiating COVID-positive and COVID-negative patients and the regulatory and commercialization efforts of the successful teams. In addition, the SCENT platforms were able to differentiate the Delta variant from the Omicron variant, which suggests that these technologies can quickly pivot to the diagnosis of other infectious disease in the next pandemic.

Speaker: Leah Croucher - NIH
I am a Program Officer at the Office for Special Initiatives at the NIH National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS). My portfolio consists of highly innovative diagnostic platforms for multiple diseases. Before I joined NIH, I was Assistant Director at the Center for Advanced Sensor Technology at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. I also spent several years as a researcher at the Center for Fluorescence Spectroscopy with Dr. Joseph Lakowicz. I got my PhD at the University of Connecticut in Biological Chemistry.