City of Hope® Research Spotlight offers a glimpse at groundbreaking scientific and clinical discoveries advancing lifesaving cures for patients with cancer, diabetes and other chronic, life-threatening diseases. Each spotlight features research-related news such as recognitions, collaborations and the latest research defining the future of medical treatment.
This roundup highlights the biology behind our sense of smell, real-world data that can be used to refine esophageal cancer treatment guidelines, a potential new approach to treating patients with type 2 diabetes, a new way to target pancreatic cancer and the start of what could become "off-the-shelf" immunotherapies for cancer.
To learn more about research at City of Hope, one of the largest and most advanced cancer research and treatment organizations in the United States and ranked among the nation's top 5 cancer centers by U.S. News & World Report, visit the Research & Innovation page.
How our nose "knows": Unraveling the biology behind our sense of smell
The human nose teems with some 400 different receptors that help us sniff out smells at the molecular level. Scientists created 3D models of four of these receptors to learn how they detect different scents, according to a Nature study.
Co-led by Nagarajan Vaidehi, Ph.D. , City of Hope chair of computational and quantitative medicine, the researchers used advanced imaging techniques to watch the engineered receptors interact with various smells and applied computational methods to understand how the receptors recognize odors. The team pinpointed two main types of receptors: one that primarily reacts to sour-smelling substances and a larger group that can identify a wide variety of odors.
The City of Hope team showed how the engineered 3D receptors closely resembled their human counterpart, suggesting they could help scientists understand how human odorant receptors work. Overall, the findings increase scientific understanding of how our nose perceives scents and could lead to new insights into the biology behind our sense of smell. Equally important, the engineered receptors provide a valuable tool for future olfactory research.
