Working as an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, David Van Buren generally spends his time designing and building instruments for space telescopes or robots that will explore other worlds in our Solar System. But for the past month, Van Buren and a group of his colleagues at JPL have been working on a project that is truly uncharted terrain for them: making a ventilator to help sick COVID-19 patients. While Van Buren had previous experience in medical engineering, never before designed a ventilator. But he and his co-workers at JPL are used to doing things they are inexperienced at. In fact, they are used to doing things that no one has experience doing. “We are used to looking for new problems … and figuring out how to solve them.” “When a scientist comes to us and says they want to go to Jupiter’s moon and drill through the ice and see what’s underneath, that’s something that’s never been done before, “Van Buren tells The Verge. “We are used to seeing new problems, things that people haven’t done before or at least we haven’t done before, and figuring out how to solve them.” After a whirlwind of 37 days of research, planning, and tinkering, a subset of engineers from JPL has created a prototype that they call the VITAL ventilator. A white digital box with a breathing tube attached, the ventilator is somewhere in between the sophisticated high-end ventilators needed by the sickest patients, and a simple ambulatory bag that can be used as a temporary measure to quickly squeeze air into the lungs. . The team did not want to interfere with the production of the most critical ventilators, so the VITAL ventilator is intended for patients who still need respiratory support but are not in the most extreme conditions. It is a temporary tool designed to last only three to four months in a hospital VITAL is specifically designed for people with COVID-19, which helped guide its design. “It comes down to all the things you can do, just retain the functions needed for COVID-19 patients,” Van Buren says.
The VITAL ventilator. Image: NASA
Throughout January and February, Van Buren had been following the news about the spread of COVID-19 in China with growing concern. Pandemics have been on her mind since the H1N1 outbreak in 2009, when her daughter had to be hospitalized due to the new strain of flu, when it became clear in early March that there was a community spread of COVID-19 in Washington and California, Van Buren really started to focus on what he could do to help. Early models suggested that hospitals would not have enough capacity or equipment to handle the influx of COVID-19 patients. Van Buren thought JPL could be an asset in the fight. One day, he ran into Rob Manning, JPL’s chief engineer, in the downtown cafeteria, and they began to talk about what they could do. “We had both been thinking, given the circumstances, maybe the projects we were spending our time on might not be the most important things we could be doing, given what we both recognized was about to happen,” says Van Buren. “We applied. more or less the pattern we apply when we build an instrument to land on Mars. “Manning found money to form a small team, and the project began on March 16. The group contacted a pulmonologist named Michael Gurevitch who has been working on ventilators for decades. He walked in and told the team the exact requirements that were needed for the fans, while a JPL employee took detailed notes on a giant whiteboard. “We pretty much applied the pattern that we apply when we build an instrument to land on Mars, and so For example, we drill the surface and take measurements of what is below, “says Van Buren. “We interact with scientists. In this case, we are engaging with the doctors to find out exactly what is needed so that we can design an instrument, or in this case, a ventilator. “
Eventually, other people at JPL joined the project, including Michelle Easter. Normally, she works on mechanisms known as actuators. These motors are used to deploy or rotate instruments like solar panels during a mission. “Actuators are often a combination of mechanisms and electronics,” Easter tells The Verge. “And that is exactly what the VITAL device is; it is a mechanism controlled by embedded electronic devices, and that kind of design is very comfortable for me.” To make VITAL, the team tried to use as many common parts as possible such as tubes, motors, valves and electronic displays. That way, anyone making the device in the future wouldn’t need to make a special order for everything needed for a more sophisticated fan. The team found that companies and suppliers were eager to help provide supplies that could be scalable. And when they didn’t have what JPL needed, they gave them references. “The companies were just opening their Rolodexes and giving us the names of their competitors.” “The companies were just opening their Rolodexes and giving us the names of their competitors,” says Easter, “Which is not what you think for an entrepreneurial mindset. But people threw all the traditional competition out the window.” Ultimately, the team settled on the final VITAL design. Because the machine is designed for COVID-19 patients , focuses on gently delivering air to stiff lungs, a characteristic symptom of the virus. Stiff lungs have a harder time expanding, so patients struggle to get enough air to breathe. VITAL is intended to provide enough air pressure patients to inflate their lungs, but not so much that the lungs expand excessively. The machine also works to ensure that the lungs It is also not completely deflated. COVID-19 patients have lung damage that causes the sides of their lungs to swell and stick together. If all the air comes out of your lungs and the sides touch, they could stick together and make it even harder to reopen. Therefore, VITAL tries to keep the lungs slightly inflated each time patients exhale.
JPL is equipped with various test facilities, such as a giant vacuum chamber used to subject the spacecraft to extreme environments. Image: NASA
Now that the team has a working prototype, they have moved on to environmental testing with the device. Every time NASA sends a spacecraft to another world, each vehicle must be subjected to extreme conditions, such as wide temperatures, intense vibrations, loud sounds, and more, to see if it can withstand the harsh environment of space. Many of those same tests are also needed to qualify medical equipment, and JPL has the facilities to run them, including a giant vacuum chamber and rigorously shaking hardware setups. “We build spaceships, not medical devices, but there are many similar items. , because they both have to be extremely high-reliability systems, for different reasons, “says Easter. “For spaceships, once you put it in space, you can never go fix it. Therefore, we must verify that it is absolutely perfect and that it works exactly as we expect in all conditions. Then of course for medical devices, we are connecting this to a human; we have to verify that we are not going to hurt a person. Both are very, very important. ”Since the Food and Drug Administration is encouraging organizations to rapidly create new devices to combat COVID-19, many of the tests that are generally required to certify equipment are no longer necessary. But JPL still has to do lift tests with VITAL to see if the machine will work in places like Denver, for example. They also need to do electromagnetic interference tests, which will determine if VITAL can work normally if someone is, for example, speaking into a cell phone nearby. “We build spaceships, not medical devices, but there are many similar items.” On April 30, JPL received word from the FDA that VITAL will receive an emergency use authorization. Now that they have the approval, the The team will send the design to companies that can mass produce VITAL and deliver the ventilators to hospitals in need. ” We are production, “says Van Buren. “We make one or two of a kind, and we send them to Mars or Saturn or somewhere. And so we’ve hired a couple of companies to help us understand the mass production aspects. ”It is unclear how the team will proceed when the VITAL ventilator is shipped out into the world. Many of the people on the team put their normal projects on hiatus to get this fan ready as soon as possible. They will likely be redesigning interplanetary space probes very soon, but their brief stint in the medical world has encouraged them. “I think everyone on the team is so grateful that we have something positive to contribute to our brainpower and teamwork. “says Easter. “It definitely helps us feel empowered in an otherwise powerless situation.”Update April 30, 6:30 pm ET: This article was updated to indicate that the VITAL Ventilator had received an emergency use clearance from the FDA.
