Sometimes we smell change before we can see or feel it, as when the scent of rain fills the air before the first drops hit our heads.
University of Illinois professor Kenneth Suslick argues we’re visual creatures who stink when it comes to sniffing our way around the world.
To help us, he invented an electronic nose that literally lets us “see” smells by recording them as patterns of colored dots–digital images as unique as fingerprints.
His research caused a stir among olfactory scientists, but its commercial potential might have stayed buried in the university’s office for faculty patent applications if it hadn’t been for a Chicago-area entrepreneur, Joel Dryer.
Dryer and Suslick teamed up about 18 months ago to form a company called ChemSensing.
Their target markets? Doctors who can check patients’ health by monitoring odors in their breath. Food inspectors, environmental officials, makers of deodorant and toothpaste, and more.
It’s too early to tell whether ChemSensing will succeed, but the partnership is a sign of progress at a university better known for letting big commercial opportunities get away.
Their story is part of the region’s attempts to play catch-up. The Internet stock bubble mobilized the state’s politicians to jump on the high-tech bandwagon. Then the bust drove home the importance of real technology–ideas protected by patents–rather than the kinds of business-plans-de-jour cooked up during dot-com mania.
As venture capitalists combed campuses for promising ideas, universities that helped their faculty commercialize research had a clear advantage in recruiting professors.
Suddenly rankings in patents, licenses and start-ups were as closely watched as football scores. And U. of I. fell short.
“At MIT or Stanford,” Suslick says, “if you haven’t been involved with a start-up company you’re viewed as unsuccessful.”
U. of I., a leading research institution with tens of millions of dollars in grants, lagged in numbers of patents and start-ups behind Stanford and MIT. It also trailed regional peers such as the Universities of Michigan and Wisconsin in the late 1990s, according to reports by the Association of University Technology Managers.
ChemSensing got off the ground during U. of I.’s recent push to move up.
When Suslick arrived to teach chemistry at Urbana-Champaign 24 years ago, he was a newly minted Stanford PhD with a love for science that started in his high school chemistry lab at New Trier.
At U. of I., he wasn’t encouraged to think beyond his lab and classroom.
“We were a state university and the knowledge we created was meant to be diffused as rapidly as possible to the public” rather than protected by patents and licensed to commercial users, he recalls.
Public-spirited? Yes. Practical? Not really.
More recently, Suslick was working with metal ions when he began thinking about an idea he calls “smell-seeing”–converting smells to images using dyes containing metal ions. The latter bind with the molecules of vapors released by smelly materials. Every odor creates a unique color pattern.
His original paper, published in October 2000 in Nature magazine, attracted attention not only from scientists, but from corporations such Colgate-Palmolive, Dow Chemical and Procter & Gamble.
About the same time, Dryer, an angel investor who co-founded and led high-tech manufacturer M-Wave Inc., contacted Suslick.
The pair hit it off. With Dryer as an investor and CEO, ChemSensing is developing a hand-held device that uses a proprietary disposable sensor for the medical diagnostics market.
They’re also looking for venture backers.
There’s no lack of competing e-noses. In the medical diagnostics market, competitors include publicly traded Osmetech and Cyrano Sciences, a venture-backed firm.
Suslick and Dryer say their U. of I.-licensed technology is cheaper and more reliable. Time will tell.
Meanwhile, Suslick senses a change for the better at U. of I. It’s as plain as the nose on his face.
