Digital Olfaction Startup Osmo Introduces Scent to the World of Artificial Intelligence in Breakthrough Science Paper

Press Releases

Aug 31, 2023

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Aug. 31, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — Osmo, a pioneer in AI and scent, has published a seminal paper in Science, entitled “A Principal Odor Map Unifies Diverse Tasks in Human Olfactory Perception,” in collaboration with the Monell Chemical Senses Center, University of Reading, and Arizona State University. Spun out of machine learning research done at Google Research, Osmo brings AI and olfactory science together to give computers a sense of smell.

Two questions have long intrigued olfactory researchers: why do molecules have specific smells, and how can we predict those smells based on their structures? Over the past century, sparse data, lack of advanced technology, and the perception of smell as a qualitative, subjective experience have limited progress in answering them. But with recent advances in AI, Osmo has been able to solve these long-standing challenges—marking a pivotal moment for engineering olfaction.

Using graph neural networks (GNN), Osmo CEO Alex Wiltschko and his team created a principal odor map (POM), the first generalized odor map of its kind that can outperform people at scent prediction. Their machine-learning model, which was trained on a dataset of 5,000 molecules, predicted the scent of hundreds of molecules that had never been smelled before, based solely on molecular structure. Comparing the model’s performance to that of individual participants, who rated scents using a lexicon of odor descriptors, it achieved better predictions of the consensus—the average of the group’s odor ratings—than any single participant in the study. It was also able to identify dozens of pairs of structurally dissimilar molecules that had counter-intuitively similar smells, and to characterize a wide variety of odor properties, such as odor strength and perceptual similarity, for 500,000 potential scent molecules.

“Our work represents the very first step to quantifying our sense of smell,” said Alex. “Computers have been able to digitize vision and hearing, but not smell—our deepest and oldest sense. The fundamental nature of smell is that it serves as the basis of human survival and plays a formative role in our emotions and memories, yet we haven’t been able to develop systematic methods to quantify this important sense. Now that we can control and engineer scents, we will finally be able to take the next step of innovating olfaction, in order to benefit human health and well-being.”

Based on this research, Osmo has created a powerful platform that accelerates the search through the billions of molecules in chemical space to predict the scent of any molecule that exists or is manufactured.

“This is a zero-to-one moment for olfaction,” said Alex. “AI has transformed so many processes in the chemical world, including drug discovery, but scent hasn’t been tackled yet. In some ways, we see AI in drug discovery as a precedent for ways that AI will revolutionize olfaction. Similar to how the advent of AI is changing the way drug hunters find new candidates that are more likely to succeed in the clinic, we see AI augmenting the role of synthetic chemists and master perfumers, the scent hunters who comb through myriad molecules to create the scents that are an integral part of our lives.”

Moving forward, Osmo is pursuing two main goals to support its mission. The fragrance industry is facing stricter standards and more difficult design challenges, so the company’s first goal is to lead the discovery of new scent ingredients that are safe, sustainable, and environmentally friendly. The second goal is to digitize smell. In the same way that RGB and frequency mapping opened up a world of technological innovation for vision and hearing, Osmo aims to create digital representations of smell that will change how we capture, transmit, and remember scents. This reflects the underlying vision of Osmo—to catalyze the evolution of scent from ephemeral to enduring.

About Osmo
Launched in January 2023 with $60 million Series A funding led by Lux Capital and Google Ventures, Osmo fuses machine learning, data science, psychophysics, olfactory neuroscience, electrical engineering, and chemistry in a multi-disciplinary approach to digitizing scent. Osmo’s work is grounded in digital olfaction research that the team validated at Google Research, including two pivotal studies that used Graph Neural Networks to predict the smell of a molecule from its structure and to investigate the biological underpinnings of odor similarity. The company has begun work in the flavor and fragrance market to create a new generation of better, safer, environmentally-friendly aroma molecules. Over time, Osmo expects to work in domains such as public health and agriculture on solutions that help humans detect diseases earlier, track pandemics faster, grow more food, catch food spoilage, and ward off insects.

Media Contact
Jeannie Entin
jeannie@osmo.ai