[Leon Dean] We are doing our best to very rapidly and with a large scale make swabs in order to try
to help detect COVID-19, because, as we all know, this is a major health crisis in our country.
And there's a shortage in our state and across the country of these swabs.
[Doug Ivanoff] One of our professors reached out over email and was asking
if we could help develop these swabs, since what
we do is work with a lot of materials that are used in these medical devices.
[Leon] Professor Jeff Moore, Director of the Beckman Institute, initially contacted several of us, because
he was in contact with others in the state who knew that this was a major problem and were
trying to figure out solutions. And so that's how we first came into lab.
[Mayank Garg] While I was sitting at home reading a lot of news, I was wondering how I can actually contribute
to this goal of helping all our doctors and nurses on the front line. And then professor Jeff Moore
actually messaged me on Twitter, saying, "Hey, we are trying to do some swab making tests.
And there's a shortage. If you can, would you like to help?" And i immediately said, "yes!"
and I came to the lab. And we started brainstorming some ideas.
[Leon] We were trying 3D printing at first, or some other kinds of molding.
But nothing was working so well. The idea came from Mayank,
who actually figured this process out. And it was it was his idea. He had the swab.
[Mayank] I still think it was more of a collective idea. But everybody was improvising from one problem
to the next. So there were some problems that I had no solution for. But my colleague, Jia,
came up with a few ideas. There's some things about the availability of some of the materials
that Doug pointed out. And then there was some things that Leon was carefully noting down to make
sure we could do this efficiently. So that was, I think, critical; that I saw everybody improvising
on the spot, within a within 24 hours period.
[Leon] What we found worked best so far was to take one of these existing products,
which is this small swab. But it has the incorrect dimensions
in order to be used for COVID-19 testing as a nasal swab. And so we are just doing a simple
thermal process in order to convert this... into this, where this is about the right dimensions
that it could be inserted into someone's nose to test for the virus.
[Mayank] We do that by basically pulling the swab longer using heat.
To do this process, to go from this small swab to a longer swab,
roughly six inches in total height, we'll attach this small swab to the binder clips,
then take this rack into the oven for our drawing process.
And then we wait for roughly three minutes. The drawing for all these swaps is complete.
And this rack will be placed onto our cooling location to cool down. And they are almost the same length,
between five and a half to six and a half inches. And, when we bend these swabs, you can see that
they're pretty stable qualitatively. And that's what we need.
[Leon] And we quickly figured out how to scale it up and reproducibly do it.
And so that it could be done by other people in other labs on campus as well.
[Doug] Over a period of, I'd say, three days, we went from having
several ideas in our heads to actually having a product; and one that we've actually delivered
to the hospital and can be tested.
[Leon] I cannot believe how quick this has happened.
The first email that any of us received was on Monday. Tuesday was our first day of trials.
Wednesday was scaling up. We made a hundred swabs that day. And then, Thursday, yesterday, was the
hundred swabs were getting tested at the local hospital. And today, we are making the video.
So it's mind-blowing how fast this process is going. But it's necessary.
[Doug] Especially coming from our research environment where we think,
"oh, this might be useful one day." But, a lot of times, we don't actually see it in use.
I think it's a human effort for us to combat this virus
and the more people the better.
Hopefully we can help make a difference.
[Mayank] Within the third week of starting this project we improved our
manufacturing speed by almost 10 times, hitting
the target of 100,000 swabs per week, which put us in a good position to now mass manufacture them,
if need arises. And, by that time, the infection rates were a little bit more under control and
some of the 3D printed swabs had gotten FDA approval. So we came to an official halt by the end of May.
But the lessons learnt here definitely did not go to a waste. Sometimes as grad students,
we get stuck into this loop of, "We have to get everything perfect in the first go, step by step."
That is not the way to think sometimes in an emergency because you need something
that you can put out in the field, get some realtime feedback, and then decide
which parameters you need to change, and how far do I want to go with this first solution versus
the eventual solution. I would love to see these ideas go through and be refined by other people.
And maybe we can get this testing delivered to multiple locations in which testing is not
really readily available so easily. And that's one of the wonderful things about this project,
that it was simply there to buy enough time for a more permanent solution.
Going in, we knew that we would really love to succeed,
but we hoped that we would never need that solution.