Diagnosing the Scent of Parkinson’s | Perdita Barran | TEDxPaloAlto

Dr. Perdita Barran uses mass spectrometry to identify the biomarkers of Parkinson’s disease. As the Director of the Michael Barber Centre for Collaborative Mass Spectrometry at the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, she works with Joy Milne, who has the unique ability to detect biomarkers of Parkinson’s disease through her sense of smell (as portrayed in the BBC documentary The Woman Who Can Smell Parkinson’s). By smelling skin swabs, Milne can differentiate between people with and without Parkinson’s. She identified changes in her husband’s scent before he was formally diagnosed with Parkinson’s, which he died of in 2015. Barran received ethical approval for her work of the skin metabolites in 2015, allowing them to work with Parkinson’s UK to conduct a larger study. Her work is sponsored by The Michael J. Fox Foundation. Professor Barran holds a Chair of Mass Spectrometry in the School of Chemistry and co-leads the mass spectrometry theme for the Rosalind Franklin I