News from the the ROSE project collaboration
© 2025 EPFL
We are excited to announce that LMIS1, together with partners in the ROSE project, has co-authored a breakthrough study published in Science Advances presenting a prototype olfactory prosthesis aimed at helping people with smell loss. The work has already gained international attention and was recently featured by Swiss Radio RTS.
Smell loss is a sensory impairment that has major consequences in many areas of daily life and for which current therapies are insufficient. A prosthesis-type technology enabling patients to sample their olfactory environment has not yet been developed. The aim of our study was, therefore, to test whether stimulation of the intranasal trigeminal system by a device combining an artificial nose with an intranasal electrical stimulator will enable patients to detect and discriminate odorant molecules. Four experiments involving normosmic individuals (n = 13) and patients with olfactory loss (n = 52) showed that individuals were able to detect their olfactory environment using the device. For discrimination, the results are less clear-cut but show that most patients can distinguish between two external stimuli. Although this substitution approach does not allow patients to smell real odors, it is a genuine first substitution solution that we could imagine offering to patients in the future.
For more details, please visit: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adu7926
Additional details can also be found here.
The full Swiss Radio RTS interview, where the project coordinator Moustafa Bensafi discusses the promise of this approach for people living with anosmia, can be found here.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 964529 to M.Ben.