Stay up to date on upcoming events, deadlines, news, and more by signing up for our newsletters!
As of this moment, man’s best friend also happens to be the state of the art in scent detection.
From drugs to diabetes, dogs can sniff out practically anything. It’s an ability that has saved countless lives and been leveraged in contexts ranging from disaster management to pest control. Unfortunately, though, there are some limitations. Each animal can only be trained to detect a single target group of scents, and that training can cost a lot in time, money, and Milkbones.
But that’s where Canaery, a startup co-founded by Professor Dmitry Rinberg of the NYU Grossman School of Medicine’s Department of Neuroscience, swoops in to provide a solution that augments animal senses with bleeding edge neurotechnology and AI modeling.
Backed by the NYU Innovation Venture Fund, Professor Rinberg and his team are working on a nose-to-computer interface that can read odor signals straight off a dog’s brain in real time. A sensor array thinner than tissue paper and smaller than a postage stamp is first positioned on the olfactory bulb — the brain’s scent processing center. Once the animal detects a scent, the electrodes on the array pick up the resulting neural signal and transmit it wirelessly to a computer that decodes it.
At this point, AI takes over. Every odor encountered by a mammalian brain lights up a distinctive combination of olfactory receptors, producing unique patterns. The Canaery team has developed software that will learn how to recognize these scent fingerprints and associate them with particular odors. This will transform our four-legged minions into mobile detection devices that can pick up and identify a staggering variety of scents. Once the AI has been trained to recognize a smell by exposing the animal to it a handful of times, the pattern is logged and the animal can detect it anywhere without undergoing specialized training itself. As Rinberg puts it, “This does for smell what machine vision does for sight.”
A resource-intensive and multi-disciplinary project like this one does not emerge from a vacuum sans external collaboration. Canaery’s journey, which began in 2020 with Rinberg and his co-founder Gabriel Lavella, has had its share of enthusiastic boosters, one of the first of which was NYU.
"They invested money in the research, they helped us with some of the patents, they connected us to some VCs, they helped us with IP,” Rinberg said. “I always get good advice from them.”
Pictured: Dmitry Rinberg, PhD, onstage during the keynote discussion at the 2023 NYU Tech Venture Summit
Lavella and Rinberg first crossed paths in 2019 at a conference on chemical sensing. At the time, Lavella worked for the Alpha innovation thinktank created by Spanish telecommunications firm Telefónica, and Rinberg had just made the first breakthroughs in scent interfaces at his NYU lab. They quickly realized that the former’s deep expertise in biosensing and the latter’s specialization in olfaction were two components of a system with paradigm-shifting possibilities.
Rinberg recalls an early phone conversation: “We were discussing a joint project and he wanted to use my expertise on scent detection. I was super skeptical and didn’t see the business idea.” With a chuckle, he recounts the moment that discussion turned: “Casually, he said we won’t build a 64-electrode array but 20,000. I paused and asked if that’s really possible. In two minutes, he explained how and I immediately said I want in. It was like I was hit by lightning. When he said that, it was the moment it all exploded in my mind — that means we’re not doing a single odor detector, we’re making a universal odor detector which you can train for any odor.”
Initially, Lavella and Rinberg planned on entering a sponsored research agreement, starting with a grant proposal. Unfortunately, Telefónica picked that moment to shut down the Alpha project. The duo, however, were not to be deterred. Lavella moved to New York and they decided to incorporate and look for funding. This proved no picnic in that liminal year of 2020.
“It was the middle of the pandemic and the search for funding was very difficult,” Rinberg said. “But then, through Gabriel’s connections, we got connected to the technology incubator IndieBio. They became our first investor.” IndieBio helped raise the seed round in which NYU was an early and key participant. Canaery had, at long last, found its wings.
The sheer cornucopia of odors Rinberg’s interface could parse opens up a universe of potential applications. Safety and security are the obvious low hanging fruit. The interface can be used to scan airports, venues and crowds for all manner of explosives and contraband. Rinberg points out that international customs agencies only have the resources to check a small percentage of incoming containers at their ports. Using Canaery’s odor detection system, customs officials could do comprehensive sweeps for illegal drugs, smuggled goods and even trafficked human beings. Another major opportunity lies in the field of pest detection. Dogs can sniff out everything from bedbugs in hotel rooms to invasive species in agricultural lands. Finally, Rinberg points out that medical uses of the technology will also be forthcoming, albeit on a longer timeline given the necessity of clinical trials. Sniffer dogs can already identify coronaviruses, Parkinson’s disease, and certain cancers. Canaery’s augmentation could take the diagnostic possibilities even further.
As of this writing, the team has tested the nose-computer interface successfully with rats, whose olfactory abilities are comparable with those of dogs. The next planned milestone, however, is successful implantation in canine test subjects. Why dogs, given that rats smell just as well? The answer is simple, says Rinberg. “People are used to dogs.” Rats may be great olfactory investigators but many of Canaery’s intended applications are public facing and most people (handlers included) would feel a lot more comfortable with dogs all up in their business than rats!
He’s quick to add that institutional support, external collaboration, and research fundamentals remain instrumental to Canaery’s continued success.
“I consider myself a scientist who is approaching deep fundamental questions and my place is at the university,” Rinberg emphasizes. “So I have been very lucky finding people to help run the business side. NYU is a good place to do this. Here, you can combine things. In many academic environments, the business stuff is often looked down on. Not me — I highly respect that side, but at the same time I want to continue doing academic work. I would be a terrible CEO. This way, I get to continue doing what I am best at.”
About the Author:
Abhimanyu 'Abhi' Das is a writer, editor, and digital curator based in New York City. He runs editorial and programming for the TEDx initiative at TED Conferences. In his off hours, he dabbles in science communication and film criticism.
