An olfactory pathway to consciousness for severely brain-damaged people
The Per Fumum Endowment Fund is supporting Professor Lledo and physicist Jean-Baptiste Masson in their new approach, which uses the sense of smell to probe the state of consciousness of neuro-injured patients. This method uses olfactory stimulation coupled with generative models for interpreting electroencephalography measurements to predict patient outcomes and guide medical practitioners in their decision-making.
The smell disorders associated with Parkinson’s disease could be the result of environmental factors acting in the nasal cavity. The nose has its own microbiota. Consequently, nasal dysbiosis would successively affect the olfactory system and the brain, ultimately causing motor disorders. The first experimental approach therefore aims to identify the presence of nasal dysbiosis in Parkinson’s disease. This project combines olfactory neuroscience, generative methods derived from machine learning, recent theories of consciousness in cerebral palsy patients and hospital medical practice. The aim is to provide a new understanding of the fate of patients. The study will involve 500 patients, including 200 for the thesis.
Several results are expected:
- Improved quality of life by restoring the sense of smell.
- Potential as a biomarker for Parkinson’s disease: due to its high prevalence and early onset, loss of smell could be studied as an early and reliable diagnostic tool for the disease.
- Treatment and management: Parkinson’s patients could benefit from probiotic treatment to restore their sense of smell, if the study succeeds in identifying the species in the nasal microbiota that contribute to anosmia.
Perception and Memory Unit of the Institut Pasteur
Pierre-Marie LLEDO
Professor Pierre-Marie Lledo is a neuroscientist and heads the “Perception and Memory” unit at the Pasteur Institute and the “Genes and Consciousness” unit at the C.N.R.S. He is also a member of the European Academy of Sciences and the New York Academy of Sciences. An award-winning expert on brain function, he won the 2007 Grand Prix of the French National Academy of Medicine for his work on brain regeneration.
Theoretical physicist and principal investigator of the DBC laboratory - Epiméthée Institut Pasteur
Jean-Baptiste MASSON
Jean-Baptiste Masson is a theoretical physicist and director of the Decision and Bayesian Computation (DBC) - Epiméthée (EPI) laboratory at the Institut Pasteur. This laboratory is a joint team comprising the Institut Pasteur, INRIA, CNRS and UPC. Its scientific interests focus on the study of the organizational principles of biological information processing, exploiting advanced models and statistical analysis frameworks to understand the physics underlying biological and neural computations, with a particular interest in embodied neuro-IA and the optimisation of small neural circuits.
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