National Post (National Edition)
THE SNIFF TEST
AN EX-DRAGON AND AN ANGEL INVESTOR GIVE PEANUT BUTTER COVID TEST A BOOST.
Jacquie Green isn’t, according to her husband, Mike, a regular National Post reader, believing the paper too “right wing.” But that didn’t stop her from reading about Professor Dana Small, a Canadian at Yale, with an ingenious idea to screen for asymptomatic COVID-19 carriers using a peanut butter sniff test, as featured in the Post’s Heroes of the pandemic series on April 18.
To review: smell loss is among the wackier and less common COVID-19 symptoms. Small and some of her sensory psychology/psychiatry pals reasoned if you could screen for smell loss, by having people sniff a jar of peanut butter daily and rate their smell, people would, in theory, notice a dip in their olfactory capabilities.
Peanut-butter sniffers noting a decline in scent would know to stay home and get tested for COVID-19, meaning fewer asymptomatic virus carriers would be on the streets, stores and in workplaces, and less people would be dying. Brilliant.
Less smart, alas, are academic funding models. The professor, a star in the field of dietary neuroscience, had applied for a grant to fund the peanut butter sniff test. But grant applications take months to process. The earliest she could expect to get funding was September, a situation she described as “incredibly frustrating.”
Jacquie Green, a Toronto resident, finished reading about Small’s woes and handed the story to her husband. His reaction? “Wow.”
“It just hit me,” Mike Green says. “A simple, easy-to-use self-test, using peanut butter, and if the professor is right — and this is one of the very early warning signs of COVID — I mean, it would be huge.”
Like so many others in self-isolation, Green was watching a pandemic run amok, and wondering how he might do something impactful, something that might help move the needle against the virus. The 69-year-old is a Toronto tech veteran, and an angel investor, whose software development firm, ObjectSharp, recently merged with a larger IT firm, Centrilogic.
A doer by nature, Green emailed the author of the original article, aka me, asking for an introduction to Small and articulating how he wanted to help with her cause.
Meanwhile, in Calgary, Brett Wilson, serial investor, philanthropist, former Dragons’ Den panellist and, for gossipy-types, one-time suitor of Canadian songbird, Sarah McLachlan, also emailed me on the day the story appeared with a cutto-the-chase question: “How much does Doc Small need to accelerate her Peanut Butter testing? Thx Brett.”
“I was more than curious,” Wilson said. “Part of the reason is, I have a daughter who actually has done research studies and has a PhD., and my son’s partner is a doctor looking after emergency COVID-response in Brisbane, Australia, and so we had been watching all the science around COVID.”
Wilson appreciated the Canadian angle of the peanut butter story. He recognized that Small was legit, and after being momentarily “distracted” by a couple other things, the man often referred to during his TV days as the Dragon “with a heart,” had a 10-minute phone conversation with the academic with no funding.
“Brett was bang, bang, bang — decisive,” Small says.
He was sold, in other words, and wired US$25,000 to Yale to kick-start Small’s research study, launched May 8, and involving frontline health-care workers at Yale New Haven Hospital.
Meanwhile, Green and his colleagues, at their end, rustled up an additional US$20,000 to further underwrite Small’s work. Far more significant than the cash, however, was a commitment to build her an app to replace the rather dowdy online survey she had been using. The app was created, with Small’s input, by a crack-team of software developers: Kristen Boyd, David Judd, Benjamin Wan, Al Sajoo and Vlad Shalamov.
And that’s not all: on top of the app was an offer to house all the resulting study data, a commitment in people-hours, expertise and ongoing support.
“Mike has championed the cause, he has just been fantastic,” Small said from New Haven, adding that smell loss is also associated with Parkinson’s Disease and Alzheimer’s, but seldom studied because there is no good way to track and measure it. Now, with the app, there is.
“Smell loss is basically a neglected symptom,” Small says. “So this app could potentially have a life after COVID.”
As for the data collected thus far from the health-care workers study, the 48-yearold professor says it “looks good,” but “good science” takes time.
And when time was of essence the professor’s fellow Canadians stepped up. “It didn’t matter where we all lived, here was an opportunity to pull together as Canadians, and I honestly don’t know if the same would have happened were it an American academic working in Canada,” she says.
“So, part of it was Canadians pulling together, and part of it was everybody wanting to do their part to try and get us out of the pandemic. But none of it would have happened without the original National Post story.”
See? Journalism matters.