For my second instalment of my AChemS blog I’m going to focus on the symposium that I was part of on 21st April.  I’ve ended up getting a bit behind with my reporting because there has just been so much to see, do and lots of people to meet, so I’m now having to play catch up…

L-R: Jeff Martens, John Ngai, Sanne Boseveldt, Antje Welge-Lussen, Duncan Boak, Valerie Duffy

Our symposium – entitled ‘Anosmia:  the patient, the clinic, the cure?’ – was put together by Dr Sanne Boesveldt, Assistant Professor at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.  Sanne has set up the first clinic in the Netherlands for people affected by smell and taste disorders; a much-needed service and a fantastic achievement.  The symposium started out by looking at the impact of olfactory loss on patients, what can potentially be done to treat patients in a clinical setting and the challenges in doing so and then a look at ongoing research towards better understanding anosmia and finding ways of treating it.

After introductions by AChemS Clinical Chair Valerie Duffy and Sanne, I took the platform to delivery my talk, which focused on the impact of anosmia on quality of life and emotional wellbeing.  I drew on the data from the research paper we had published in 2014 which is based on our survey of Fifth Sense members’ experiences and played the ‘Let’s talk smell and taste’ video that we made at last year’s Fifth Sense conference.  It’s important to note that although AChemS is a body of scientists and researchers who work on smell and taste, as an organisation they have never before had any patient representation to tell them how significant the impact of chemosensory disorders can be.

In my talk, therefore, I not only covered the issues that patients face and the work that Fifth Sense is doing but issued a rallying call to the audience – you are the people whose work can potentially benefit the people our organisation represents, and we need your support.

I think it’s worth saying at this point, before I cover the rest of the symposium, that I’ve been absolutely delighted with the response to my talk.  It has been very positively received and from the many conversations I’ve had over the past couple of days there is clearly a huge amount of support amongst the AChemS community for Fifth Sense and our cause.  I’ll come back to this in a subsequent post.

I was followed by a really interesting talk from Antje Welge-Lussen, an ENT Surgeon at the University Hospital Basel, in Switzerland.  Anjte spoke about diagnosis, treatment and prognosis of patients with sinonasal anosmia, drawing on some case studies of patients with problems such as chronic rhinosinusitis, nasal polyps and allergic rhinitis.  Antje made a really important point; that before any diagnosis to be made, a patient’s history should be considered, a clinical examination undertaken, followed by a smell test and then CT and/or MRI scan.  Whilst there are challenges in successfully diagnosing and treating patients even when this process is carried out in full, I’m aware from speaking to Fifth Sense members that this process does not always happen in an ENT consultation; smell testing, for example, is not standard practice in UK ENT clinics.

John Ngai, Professor of Neurobiology at the University of California then talked about the research that he and his team are doing around stem cell regeneration in the olfactory epithelium of mice (the olfactory system of mice is very similar to that of humans and a great deal of research around olfaction and olfactory dysfunction is done using mice).

The final speaker in our symposium was Prof Jeffrey Martens of the University of Florida.  Jeff and his team are doing some remarkable work to explore how gene therapy can potentially be used to restore olfactory function.  Again, they are currently using mouse models to explore this, but the hope is that this can one day be used to benefit humans.  I’m going to be writing another article that explores the work of the Martens Lab in more detail.

All in all our symposium was a great success and we’ve received  a lot of positive feedback from audience members.  The only down side was finding out about the death of Prince minutes before our session was due to start (I’m a big fan).  However, on with the show…A big thanks to Sanne for organising the symposium and inviting me to be part of it.

Duncan