NASA Develops COVID-19 Prototype Ventilator in 37 Days
A high-pressure ventilator designed by the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for rapid production is being tested for use in medical centers.
A new high-pressure ventilator developed by NASA engineers
and tailored to treat coronavirus (COVID-19) patients passed a critical test Tuesday
at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, an epicenter of
COVID-19 in the United States.
The device, called VITAL (Ventilator Intervention
Technology Accessible Locally), was developed by engineers at NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California to free up the nation's limited
supply of traditional ventilators so they may be used on patients with the most
severe COVID-19 symptoms.
"We specialize in spacecraft, not medical-device
manufacturing," said JPL Director Michael Watkins. "But excellent
engineering, rigorous testing and rapid prototyping are some of our
specialties. When people at JPL realized they might have what it takes to
support the medical community and the broader community, they felt it was their
duty to share their ingenuity, expertise and drive."
NASA next is seeking expedited FDA approval for the device
via an emergency use authorization, a fast-track approval process developed for
crisis situations that takes just days rather than years. To get input from a
gold-standard medical facility, JPL delivered a prototype of the device to the
Human Simulation Lab in the Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and
Pain Medicine at Mount Sinai for additional testing.
Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California prepare to ship a prototype ventilator for coronavirus patients to the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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"We were very pleased with the results of the testing
we performed in our high-fidelity human simulation lab," said Dr. Matthew
Levin, Director of Innovation for the Human Simulation Lab and Associate
Professor of Anesthesiology, Preoperative and Pain Medicine, and Genetics and
Genomics Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine. "The NASA prototype
performed as expected under a wide variety of simulated patient conditions. The
team feels confident that the VITAL ventilator will be able to safely ventilate
patients suffering from COVID-19 both here in the United States and throughout
the world."
VITAL can be built faster and maintained more easily than
a traditional ventilator, and is composed of far fewer parts, many of which are
currently available to potential manufacturers through existing supply chains. Its
flexible design means it also can be modified for use in field hospitals being
set up in convention centers, hotels, and other high-capacity facilities across
the country and around the globe.
Like all ventilators, VITAL requires patients to be
sedated and an oxygen tube inserted into their airway to breathe. The new
device wouldn't replace current hospital ventilators, which can last years and
are built to address a broader range of medical issues. Instead, VITAL is
intended to last three to four months and is specifically tailored for COVID-19
patients.
"Intensive care units are seeing COVID-19 patients
who require highly dynamic ventilators," said Dr. J.D. Polk, NASA's chief
health and medical officer. "The intention with VITAL is to decrease the
likelihood patients will get to that advanced stage of the disease and require
more advanced ventilator assistance."
The Office of Technology Transfer and Corporate
Partnerships at Caltech, which manages JPL for NASA, will offer a free license
for VITAL and currently is reaching out to the commercial medical industry to
find manufacturers for the device.
To learn more about how NASA is helping in the national
response to COVID-19, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/coronavirus
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