GV aims to help create a company that can detect disease, literally

Alex Wiltschko has what he thinks is a great idea. He wants to start a company that digitizes fragrances.

It's a natural step for Wiltschko, who has a doctorate in neurobiology from Harvard, where he studied how the brain processes odors. He didn't accidentally end up in that specific group, he suggests. This is due to an "obsession with scent and olfaction" which he came to study alongside Sandeep "Bob" Datta, a Harvard professor who has long focused on what happens after sensory neurons picked up a scent.

Researchers were trying to better understand how the human brain works, including why certain smells are linked to memories. For a long time too, their field of study was overshadowed by the attention that sight and image processing have received over the years. Then came Covid 19, and with it much more focus on how taste and smell are processed - and lost.

Now the race has begun to better understand and digitize and even recreate the scent. Indeed, in July, a neurotech startup called Canaery raised $4 million in seed funding to develop an odor detection platform. Moodify, another startup working on fragrance digitization, closed an $8 million fundraising round last year, including from Procter & Gamble.

As Datta told Harvard Magazine late last year: "Right now there is a great interest in smell among physicians and the millions of patients whose sense of smell is affected. And that really highlighted, collectively, how little we know about all aspects of our sense of smell."

Wiltschko is one of the chosen few, for now, who sees an opportunity in resolving these unknowns. His longtime employer, Google, sees it too. After spending nearly six years with Google AI, Wiltschko has just become an entrepreneur-in-residence (EIR) at GV, the venture capital arm of the search giant, where, more specifically, he hopes to build a company that can identify more quickly diseases based on specific odor molecules.

It's a significant vote of confidence from GV, which has named only five life sciences-focused EIRs in its 13-year history, and also incubated Flatiron Health (which then sold to pharmaceutical giant Roche in 2018 for $1.9 billion); gene-editing company Verve Therapeutics, which went public last year; and Rome Therapeutics, a startup that develops therapies for cancer and autoimmune diseases by focusing on parts of DNA that have been largely overlooked by researchers, he says. (Rome has already raised at least $127 million in two funding rounds.)

The big question, of course, is what will happen to the effort. To find out more about how he approaches his mission, we spoke yesterday with Wiltschko, who was amiable but also reluctant to say too much. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

TC: I've never encountered anything like this before. Are you trying to better understand how to build neural networks based on how people process and compartmentalize odor information?

AW: Looking back, every time computers acquired a new "sense", like seeing or hearing, society completely changed for the better, right? When we first learned how to store visual images, in the 19th century, and eventually how to store them on computers in the 20th century, all of a sudden we were able to do things like take x-rays. We could do things like store memories [of] the visual world. And we didn't need painters to do it, anyone could do it. We did it again to hear; we [could make] the music [captured in one place] accessible to as many people as possible.

But computers don't smell. They don't have the ability to sense the chemical world [so] we can't store the really powerful memories that we associate with smell, like the smell of my grandmother's house. It's just gone. It only lives in my mind. The smells of the people I love and the places I've been are completely fleeting today.

We [also] know that diseases have a smell. We know that different states of well-being and health have a smell. Plants, when they are sick or when they are healthy, have a different smell. The amount of information available in the world that we could potentially act upon to extend our lives, make our lives more joyful, produce more food - this can only really happen inside living things inside inside of living noses - if we could...