George Preti, 75, died on March 3 in Horsham, Pennsylvania. “George was a pioneer in the study of human body odors. Over a 50-year period at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, he expanded his interest from odor communication involving axillary, oral, and vaginal odors into fields...
It started with a cough. In the early days, when COVID-19 first began to spread beyond its origin in Wuhan, China, doctors warned about a pesky virus that was causing flu-like symptoms: fever, shortness of breath, a stubborn cough. Doctors have since learned that the...
If you’re getting bored in quarantine, here’s a fun new hobby to try: sniffing stuff in your kitchen. Two international projects are asking ordinary people to rate the scents of household items in order to gather data on one of COVID-19’s more mysterious symptoms: anosmia,...
DiscoveryBioMed has been awarded a $1.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health’s Small Business Technology Transfer Research (STTR) program to find bitter taste blockers to improve medication compliance. The award for the local biotech company is administered by the National Institute on Deafness and...
Last month, I wrote about innovation districts’ critical efforts to mitigate the impacts of COVID-19. Since the outset of the pandemic, these districts have leveraged their academic research capabilities, innovation infrastructure (e.g., laboratories, advanced technologies, Big Data for modeling), and local and global peer networks...
With rapid onset loss of smell being identified as a potential marker for COVID-19, a global consortium of health organizations — including representatives from two Philadelphia institutions — have united to study the connection between the chemical senses and the coronavirus. Scientists at Temple University and...
While COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, is generally a respiratory infection with coughing and shortness of breath as key features of the illness, some people have reported other symptoms, including loss of smell, heart trouble, and diarrhea. These less common symptoms, especially...
One big question among doctors treating COVID-19 centers around one of the unique symptoms why so many patients suddenly lose their sense of smell and taste? It's believed to happen in about 30% of all patients. And will it be permanent? A Philadelphia researcher is on a global...
We all go down our internet rabbit holes. For some of us, it’s news bloopers or cat fails. But for Jody Piltz-Seymour, an adjunct professor of ophthalmology at University of Pennsylvania and attending surgeon at Wills Eye Hospital just outside Philadelphia, it was seeking out...
George Preti, an organic chemist who devoted his career to studying bodily odors and how they can be weaponized in detecting disease, died on March 3 in Hatboro, Pa. He was 75. The cause was bladder cancer, according to the Monell Chemical Senses Center, a Philadelphia-based...
