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 Institute. She was awarded the 2009 Joseph Black award and the 2019 Theophilus Redwood Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry. Her work has furthered biomedical research by using home-customized instrumentation to provide a deeper understanding of structure function relationships of metabolites, proteins and peptides at the molecular level. Her more recent work focuses on disordered and dynamic protein systems, weak interactions and supramolecular systems, as well as the use of ion mobility mass spectrometry in metabolite and synthetic biology analysis. Dr. Barran uses mass spectrometry to identify the biomarkers of Parkinson's disease .As 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).

Prof. Barran co-leads the mass spectrometry theme for the Rosalind Franklin Institute. She was awarded the 2009 Joseph Black award from the Royal Society of Chemistry Analytical Division. Her work has furthered biomedical research by using home-customized instrumentation to provide a deeper understanding of structure function relationships of metabolites, proteins and peptides at the molecular level. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

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