This Philly institution is devoted entirely to the senses of taste and smell. We spoke with its new director.
Benjamin P.C. Smith heads the 132-employee research institute known to Philadelphians for its big golden sculpture of a nose and mouth.
Benjamin P.C. Smith is the new executive director and president of the Monell Chemical Senses Center, Philadelphia’s independent research institution devoted to studying the senses of taste and smell.
Trained as a toxicologist, Smith started in late August at the 132-employee center. He moved here from Singapore, where he was director of a national government food safety research program.
With a faculty that includes chemists, biologists, neuroscientists, and geneticists, Monell conducts interdisciplinary research on how the human body interacts with chemicals in the environment, with applications in the fields of nutrition and diagnosing disease.
Smith is taking over the reins from acting director and biologist Nancy E. Rawson. He is not a newcomer to Monell, having worked as postdoctoral fellow there from 2002 to 2003 in the lab of former center director Gary Beauchamp.
The center is in the second year of a five-year grant of up to $26 million from the Ambrose Monell Foundation, a family foundation that established Monell with initial funding in 1968. That amount is nearly double the institute’s $14 million budget for the fiscal year that ended June 2021. Smith said the new funds would be used to hire more scientists, upgrade facilities, and foster collaborations with other institutions.
He spoke recently with The Inquirer about Monell’s research on nutrition, the loss of smell, and the bodily signals that travel between the digestive system and the brain — the “gut-brain axis” that is targeted by the diabetes drugs Ozempic, Wegovy, and others that also can lead to weight loss.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Monell scientists showed years ago that people could be weaned from craving salty foods. Now they’re about to launch a similar study of sugar. Do you think that’s likely to work?
We can acclimate to different tastes. This earlier work that was done with salt, it showed that by lowering the amount of salt in food, people could get used to it. People can adjust to different diets.
In theory, I think it’s a great thing to try with sugar. We don’t know. But in principle, it’s the same concept. The challenge is, how effective is that going to be across the population? What you want to do is inform health policy.
There are so many different sources of sweet perception in the diet. We’ve got a lot of sweeteners, artificial ones, as well. Where does sugar fit into all of that? Can we distinguish the difference between sugar and some of these other sweeteners? If we can get people not craving sugar, then we’re taking a huge step forward to actually reducing the intake.
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What’s your take on Ozempic and similar new drugs, which can cause weight loss even though that wasn’t why they originally were developed?
These drugs target diabetes. They are having this secondary or parallel effect on actually influencing how we perceive when we’re full or feel the need to eat more. How can we use that to become a treatment or solution for the problem of overeating? There’s a lot more that needs to be understood.
Our scientists are working to better understand the gut-brain axis — how signals from the foods we’re ingesting connect back to the brain. Telling us: “Should we eat more?” or “Am I full?” And why certain substances in foods, even when we’re full, keep us saying “Yes, I want more.” Understanding how our body decodes these signals will be huge in understanding how we can better control diet and food intake.
Your colleagues have made headway in understanding the loss of smell, a common side effect of COVID. But so far, clinicians have yet to find many effective treatments. Any promising work on the horizon?
It’s challenging, but I think the important thing to stress in this area is that for a long time, anosmia [the loss of smell] and parosmia [a distorted sense of smell] weren’t even seen as a big issue.
The research that has been done here at Monell and with our collaborators has opened our eyes to this problem. Now people are realizing its importance, and COVID was a big part of that.
(Smith described how Monell scientists had developed a rapid test called SCENTinel to identify an impaired sense of smell, which can be caused by viral infections, brain injuries, aging, exposure to air pollution, and neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s disease.)