A Nurse with Olfactory Superpowers
Drupad will be speaking jointly with Joy Milne.
Their talk will start with the story of Joy’s remarkable life. While working as an NHS nurse in Scotland, Joy discovered she had a true superpower. She discovered she could smell the presence of Parkinson’s Disease on afflicted people far in advance of medical diagnostics. In the case of her husband, Joy was able to detect the onset of Parkinson’s 12 years before medical science could confirm what she already knew.
Eventually, she was put to the test by the University of Edinburgh and they confirmed what she knew all along. Joy could, in fact, reliably detect the presence of Parkinson’s with her superhuman sense of smell. In their research, she had diagnosed Parkinson’s correctly in 100% of the cases she was tested on.
Today, Joy is working closely with the University of Manchester and Dr. Drupad Trivedi to better understand Joy’s incredible abilities. They are now exploring the possibilities extending her abilities to other diseases, most notably tuberculosis. They cross the Pennines to join us in Newcastle to reveal the remarkable discoveries their research is uncovering and how it could change the future of disease detection.
Drupad Trivedi’s bio
Dr. Drupad Trivedi is the Community for Analytical and Measurement Sciences (CAMS) Lecturer at the School of Chemistry at the University of Manchester and is a leading expert in metabolomics, the scientific study of chemical processes involving metabolites, the small molecule by-products of cell metabolism.
At the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, Drupad has developed innovative approaches for diagnosing diseases (e.g., cancer, tuberculosis, COVID-19, Parkinson’s), studying microbial metabolism, and detecting food adulteration. He has contributed significantly to the understanding of the changes in chemical composition of sebaceous secretions and scent of diseases, associating their role with diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, Tuberculosis, COVID-19 and REM sleep behaviour disorder. This highly novel work has helped bring sebum metabolomics to the foreground of disease diagnostics.
Drupad has also co-founded Sebomix Ltd., a University spinout focusing on “sebomics” for disease research and the development of novel testing diagnostics for Parkinson’s Disease.
