A bionic device may help COVID-19 survivors smell again, researchers suggest

Starting almost three years ago, one of the most annoying symptoms of COVID-19 was the loss of taste and smell. Some of us have lost a significant sense of smell, even if we recovered from the disease.

Good news came from the Virginia Commonwealth Study researchers Richard Costanzo and Daniel Coelho. Now, a ground-breaking bionic nose may help to covid survivor smell again.

“Viruses have been knocking out the sense of smell for a long time,” Costanzo said. As suggested in the journal Nature, olfactory dysfunction can also be a consequence of aging and brain trauma, and there are not many ways to treat this dysfunction.

The best-known treatment is olfactory training, and this method can be helpful in some situations, and researchers are looking into several methods for healing damaged olfactory tissues. However, it's time to meet with a new method: olfactory implants.

As reported in IEEE, Costanzo, an emeritus professor of physiology and biophysics who cofounded VCU's Smell and Taste Disorders Center in the 1980s, one of the country's first such clinics, may consider this effort to be his most significant professional accomplishment.

He spent several years studying olfactory loss and looking into the viability of biological regeneration before developing a technological solution in the 1990s.

"Thanks to COVID, this has become an area of more interest to investors,” also said Daniel Coelho in Nature. “The size of the market has grown exponentially, unfortunately.”

It started before COVID-19

The study took off in 2011 when he started conversing with his colleague Daniel Coelho, a VCU professor of otolaryngology and cochlear implant expert. They immediately noticed that a scent prosthetic could be analogous to a cochlear implant.

"It’s taking something from the physical world and translating it into electrical signals that strategically target the brain,” Dr.Coelho said. The two researchers' olfactory-implant system was also given a U.S. patent in 2016.

Besides Dr. Costanzo and Dr. Coelho, many people support bionic nose research —an electronic nose expert in England, several clinicians in Boston, and a businessman in Indiana.

To avoid creating the false impression that a commercial device will soon be ready, Costanzo believes it would be better to be wary. But still, he doesn't want to hide his optimism from the odor-loss sufferers.

The team is currently working on improving the sensors' ability to detect more than a few odors and determining the optimal way to communicate with the brain.