Chen awarded SPIE Optics and Photonics Education Scholarship

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by Lori Brandt, UCI Samueli School of Engineering

May 21, 2020 – Samueli School biomedical engineering graduate student researcher Jason Chen has been awarded a 2020 Optics and Photonics Education Scholarship ($3,000) from SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, for his potential contributions to the field.

Chen’s research involves developing innovative optical methods to functionally view and assess the upper airway, eye and coronary arteries. As a doctoral candidate, Chen works in the Functional Optical Coherence Tomography Lab of Zhongping Chen, professor of biomedical engineering. He collaborates closely with Dr. Brian Wong, professor of otolaryngology, and Dr. Andrew Browne, assistant clinical professor of ophthalmology.

“I am very grateful for the insightful guidance from my research advisers as well as the support from the BME and BLI leadership,” said Chen. “I want to give my appreciation to my colleagues and friends, who spend days and nights in the lab with me to push our research forward. This scholarship will provide me additional opportunities for traveling to conferences and attending advanced seminars, and I will do my best to become a better scientist in the field of biophotonics.”

Chen is one of 78 students to receive the SPIE education scholarship this year. Since it began, SPIE has distributed over $6 million dollars in individual scholarships, reflecting the society’s commitment to the next generation of optical scientists and engineers around the world.

Read full UCI Samueli School of Engineering article.

Lumitron Technologies: Building the X-ray of the Future

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by Jessie Yount, Orange County Business Journal

INNOVATION: LASER-BASED FIRM LANDS IN IRVINE, RAISES $34M TO FIGHT CANCER

A 30-person company in the heart of Irvine plans to commercialize a new type of X-ray platform, one that it calls the biggest breakthrough in the imaging industry since the X-ray was invented in 1895.

Lumitron Technologies Inc. is developing products for medical and industrial imaging, with a stated goal of building its first commercial imaging system by the end of the year.

The technology that Lumitron is using is built upon nearly 20 years of federally funded research totaling $220 million.

The 7-year-old company recently completed a $34 million Founder’s round of financing with backers including Newport Beach’s Roth Capital Partners; it expects it to be the only round of private capital before bringing the technology to market.

Among the many possibilities for the technology, Chief Executive and Chief Technology Officer Chris Barty said his mission for the company is to “find, detect and treat cancer in ways that no one has been able to do before.”

Barty said other potential uses of the company’s imaging products include certification for additive manufacturing parts.

1,000x

X-ray machines today are largely made the same way as they were first discovered.

Barty explained, “You take electrons and slam ‘em into metal. As the x-rays pass through the body, dense structures like bones absorb the X-ray beam and produce a shadow to show you your broken rib.”

Lumitron’s HyperView platform, on the other hand, uses a new type of high-energy light source (called a laser-Compton) to recreate the power of a synchrotron device—a particle acceleration machine about the size of a football field that speeds up electrons to nearly the speed of light—in a device the size of a modern CT scanner.

The synchrotron was invented in 1945 and uses magnets to accelerate particles. Due to its large size and half-billion-dollar price tag, it’s not a commercially scalable invention.

There are currently 60 in existence around the world and scientists typically get one week out of a year to conduct studies using the device.

“It’s a common story,” Barty said. “There are a number of studies conducted on synchrotrons that are very compelling from a medical perspective, but completely impractical from a clinical perspective because it takes a year to get time on a synchrotron.”

Lumitron’s product offers the same capabilities in a much smaller and more cost efficient device, providing up to 1,000 times the resolution of a traditional X-ray machine while producing significantly less harmful dose to the patient.

Barty said, by way of example, that if you were looking at a view of the Golden Gate Bridge from Marin County (about 30 miles north of the bridge), and magnified it by 1,000 times, you could see the stitching of a Bentley logo on the seat inside of a car, while it was driving along the bridge.

He added, “From that perspective, when you start talking about medical applications—it’s really a very transformational event.”

Research Possibilities

Because its platform can see down to the cellular level, the possibilities for cancer discovery and treatment using the HyperView platform are particularly compelling, according to the company.

For example, “There’s a debate right now about the screening process [for mammograms] and whether it prevents or causes cancer because of the exposure to radiation,” Barty explained.

He continued, “With our device, the radiation dose is 100 times lower, so you’d have to get 100 more mammograms for it to be an issue.”

Lumitron’s device would also make the experience more comfortable for women and increase the likelihood of accurate results over time, because the machine doesn’t depend on a technician placing metal plates around the area of the body that needs an X-ray.

In addition to reduced risk for cancer screenings, Lumitron’s platform offers treatment options for cancer patients.

Currently, oncologists treat cancer by adding a radioactive element to a drug, which attaches to cancer cells via proteins that it creates as it grows in the body.

The problem with this type of treatment is twofold: the radiation is known to accumulate elsewhere, like the lymph nodes and pituitary glands, and once the cancer is gone, the radiation doesn’t just leave the body.

The HyperView platform is designed to identify any element on the periodic table and use non-radioactive elements such as gold to detect and treat cancer—without introducing radioactive elements or ever moving the human body, according to Barty.

Other applications include mining rare earth metals—such as the materials needed to power rechargeable batteries in Tesla cars and other electric vehicles—and screening additive manufacturing parts for aviation and aerospace needs.

The company’s first priority is medical applications, Barty said.

National Security

Barty received his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in applied physics from Stanford University and a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, physics and chemical engineering from North Carolina State University.

He went on to serve as faculty for Stanford University and led a research organization at the University of California-San Diego.

He then developed the core technologies for Lumitron as chief technology officer for the laser directorate of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), one of three nuclear labs owned by the federal government and housed under the Department of Energy.

He initially set out to develop an X-ray system for national security, with the goal to prevent terrorists from smuggling uranium-235 into the country.

Barty is the sole inventor for about 80% of the company’s core technologies and co-creator of the additional 20%.

He met co-founder and Executive Chairman Maurie Stang through a mutual acquaintance in 2013.

Lumitron was born soon after, though it took another three years to acquire the rights to license the technology.

In 2017, Lumitron finally acquired the commercial rights to license its laser-based technology from the government and Barty departed LLNL the following year.

Medtech Corridor

Barty intended to build Lumitron near LLNL in Pleasanton.

When the University of California-Irvine came knocking, he was still set on Pleasanton for its close proximity to talent.

Then “I spent three days on a recruitment trip, and after a day and a half, it became very clear that it was better for us to build the company here, where the end user is,” Barty said.

Barty cited the UCI Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, the only National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer center in OC, as one such example.

Another highlight: the university’s entrepreneurial tech-transfer branch, UCI Beall Applied Innovation.

“There isn’t an entity like Applied Innovation elsewhere,” said Barty, noting its uniqueness even compared to his alma mater Stanford.

“It’s quite remarkable, and it’s not UCI centric. It tries to view itself as a growth hub for OC,” Barty said.

He said recruitment has been a breeze for the business; the company has yet to write a job post and has found talent from both Livermore and OC’s medtech corridor.

Barty was given joint appointments at UCI’s School of Physical Sciences and School of Medicine. He also leads the Convergence Optical Sciences Initiative at the Beckman Laser Institute and Medical Clinic, which aims to commercialization optics and photonics technologies for human health.

Other local activities focused on oncology include the City of Hope campus at the Great Park Neighborhoods in Irvine, with a stated $1 billion investment.

Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian is also reportedly working to expand its cancer network, and Keck Medicine of USC plans to build a new cancer clinic close to Hoag’s Newport Beach hospital (see story, page 9).

Commercial Opportunities

Lumitron isn’t worried about the technical capabilities of its platform.

Commercial activities rather hinge on the company’s ability to take enough cost out of manufacturing to reach an individual purchasing price point—something the company is working to improve and perfect, Barty said.

Once the device reaches clinical markets, it will compete with modern MRIs, which go for about $3 million today, added Barty.

Prior to regulatory approvals, the company’s first commercial markets are early adopters, hospitals and university researchers who will pay a much higher price because they value the technology for the ability to publish research papers and make discoveries.

“From that perspective, we have a very compelling value proposition,” Barty said. “If you take just 10% of the 16,000 or so research hospitals in the world, you have more than a $10 billion market.”

The company also plans to make a second device, the only difference being a higher voltage machine, for industrial purposes down the line.

Looking Ahead

Lumitron recently closed a $34.4 million Founder’s round. The round had a $150 million pre-money valuation, according to a Business Journal estimate.

Singapore-based Vickers Venture Partners led the completion of the Founder’s round. Other participants included Roth Capital, as well as Perennial Value Management and Clinton Capital, both in Australia, and several global family offices.

There were no preferred stock terms; all investors took common stock terms, said Barty.

He said the company “is pretty much done raising funds” and will look to public markets for future financing, noting that Vickers is particularly good at helping companies go public.

Lumitron’s headquarters at UCI Research Park is now in the process of expanding from 15,000 square feet to 22,000 square feet.

The extra 7,000 square feet of space, which is still moving ahead with construction, is allocated for on-site manufacturing, which the company aims to keep local and provide research access to UCI faculty and staff.

Read the full Orange County Business Journal article.

* The article above reflects corrections to the inaccuracies of the original published Orange County Business Journal article.

New UV Light Sterilizer Technology Could Rapidly Disinfect Surfaces, Indoor Air

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by AZoOptics

The home entertainment console found in almost all houses could be the key to a new weapon in the battle against the coronavirus.

Led by physicist Chris Barty of the University of California, Irvine (UCI), a research team has been investigating the use of diodes from Blu-ray digital video disk devices as sources for deep-ultraviolet (UV) laser photons to quickly disinfect not just surfaces but also the indoor air around people.

According to Barty, who is a Distinguished Professor of physics and astronomy at UCI, such UV light sterilizers would be inexpensive when compared to existing medical- and scientific-grade systems and it would be possible to use them almost anywhere.

“If these sources are successful, I think you could build them into a mask and clean the air that’s coming in and out of you. Or you could set these things up in the air circulation ducts of major buildings, and the airflow that goes through could be sterilized.”

Chris Barty, Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Irvine

In addition, they could be integrated into hand-held wand devices, stated Barty, or as a “light curtain” through which people enter a room, where they are exposed to UV-C radiation. He added that at a wavelength of 200 to 260 nm, the UV radiation will kill viruses and other pathogens with only minimal risk to humans.

“There is evidence to suggest that the UV-C band is actually not an issue for us, especially at the shorter wavelengths, because it gets absorbed by dead skin cells or by a teardrop on your eye,” noted Barty, who is also the head of UCI’s Convergent Optical Sciences Initiative.

“Hospitals use UV-emitting robots that are about the size of a dorm room refrigerator. They just wheel them in and plug them into the wall to sterilize the place, but everybody has to leave because in addition to UV-C, they make a lot of UV-A and UV-B, which can cause harm to humans.”

Chris Barty, Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Irvine

Such roaming hospital sterilizers—based on high-current mercury discharge lamps—are too expensive to be deployed at the scale required to combat the coronavirus, which exists everywhere from meatpacking plants to cruise ships. Barty noted that Blu-ray diode lasers provide a promising way to a compact, affordable solution, as the technology is versatile and costs only tens of dollars per unit.

Barty and his colleagues have been working to devise a technique to halve the wavelength of photons discharged by Blu-ray diodes—which is about 405 nm—to the germicidal UV-C band.

“This is really more of an applied physics versus a pure physics view of the world. The issue is not whether you can make UV-C light. It’s whether you can fundamentally reduce the dollar-per-watt output of a device to a place that it becomes compelling to use UV-C light.”

Chris Barty, Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Irvine

Barty said Blu-ray sterilizers could be produced in the “same kind of quantities as you can make other telecommunications components, so you could really change the game.”

Commenting over the current scenario, where meticulous efforts are being taken to develop vaccines to prevent COVID-19 infections and drugs for the treatment of people affected by the virus, Barty noted, “I would prefer that we just destroy it.”

Read the full AZO Optics article.

ACE Member Institutions Lead the Way in Research and Technology to Fight COVID-19

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​​As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, our member institutions have been contributing their expertise in research and technology to help mitigate the crisis. As ACE President Ted Mitchell wrote in The Hill, university research is key to COVID-19 breakthroughs and serving the public good. While most of the attention has focused on university labs working on vaccines, higher education’s involvement has reached into a number of other areas.

The lab initiatives are varied and diverse. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have joined forces with 75 other public health, academic, and commercial institutions, including the University of Washington, to study the COVID-19 genome and examine how the virus spread through the United States. The University of Iowa has made its large stock of laboratory-created antibodies, often used for cancer research, available for researchers trying to understand the coronavirus.

A number of ACE member institutions are looking into innovative ways to test for and treat COVID-19. Researchers in the University of California system and Stanford University are working to increase testing capacity, evaluate drugs such as remdesivir and sarilumab as potential treatments, and study the virus’ genetics. Thanks to an automated testing robot at UC Davis, the university is able to produce 400 test per day with hopes to increase to 1,400 daily tests. Tulane University has repurposed a research lab to instead test for coronavirus and is now able to process nearly 200 tests daily. And the University of California, Berkeley is among the hosts of an artificial intelligence research consortium accepting proposals on ways to combat the coronavirus.

“What we’d like to do here is to provide for a certain adventurousness. We won’t be afraid to have even a substantial fraction of the research projects fail,” said Shankar Sastry, a professor of engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley.

This research effort extends beyond the lab and into digital projects as well. A consortium of researchers from Stanford University and 11 other institutions have created N95decon.org, a website that helps filter the scientific literature on how to decontaminate and reuse N95 masks. Faculty at the University of Maryland, in collaboration with Facebook, have created a global survey to collect coronavirus data and help identify hard-hit regions and guide public health officials in their decision-making. A team of computer scientists at the University of Southern California (USC) has started work on a coronavirus contact-tracing app.

“This project is the culmination of many years of work, with many strands of research coming together to tackle a worldwide pandemic,” said Cyrus Shahabi, the chair of USC’s Department of Computer Science.

ACE Member institutions have also begun creating different technologies to address the spread of COVID-19. Doctors at Emory University have built a new online tool that helps people screen themselves for coronavirus symptoms and receive advice on next steps. Meanwhile, the online COVID-19 web tracker, designed by Johns Hopkins University researchers, has become an authoritative source for updates on coronavirus cases.

The personal protective equipment shortage has also led to some creative solutions. For example, a team of researchers at the University of Texas at Austin is currently prototyping a type of resuscitator that uses a windshield wiper motor instead of manual compression to help patients breathe. Likewise, two doctors at University of California, Irvine (UCI) have joined with the Beckman Laser Institute & Medical Clinic to build a “bridge” ventilator—a device that can be sold inexpensively, made quickly, and help relieve some of the pressure on intensive care units.

“It’s a once-in-a-generation call to arms that we all must respond to,” said UCI surgeon Brian Wong. “Our designs are different. We’re building ‘bridge’ devices that can be easily made to serve as stopgaps when medical-grade ventilators are not in full supply.”

Read the full ACE article.

UCI physicists exploring use of Blu-ray disc lasers to kill COVID-19, other viruses

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Low-cost technology could be employed in hand-held devices and ventilation systems

Irvine, Calif., May 19, 2020 – A new weapon in the arsenal against the coronavirus may be sitting in your home entertainment console. A team led by physicist Chris Barty of the University of California, Irvine is researching the use of diodes from Blu-ray digital video disc devices as deep-ultraviolet laser photon sources to rapidly disinfect surfaces and the indoor air that swirls around us.

Barty, UCI Distinguished Professor of physics & astronomy, said that such UV light sterilizers would be cheap compared to current medical- and scientific-grade systems and that it’d be possible to deploy them almost anywhere.

“If these sources are successful, I think you could build them into a mask and clean the air that’s coming in and out of you,” he said. “Or you could set these things up in the air circulation ducts of major buildings, and the airflow that goes through could be sterilized.”

They could also function in hand-held wand devices, Barty said, or as a “light curtain” through which people walk as they enter a room, exposing them to UV-C radiation. He noted that at this wavelength – between 200 and 260 nanometers – UV radiation will destroy viruses and other pathogens but poses minimal risk to humans.

“There is evidence to suggest that the UV-C band is actually not an issue for us, especially at the shorter wavelengths, because it gets absorbed by dead skin cells or by a teardrop on your eye,” said Barty, head of UCI’s Convergent Optical Sciences Initiative.

“Hospitals use UV-emitting robots that are about the size of a dorm room refrigerator. They just wheel them in and plug them into the wall to sterilize the place, but everybody has to leave because in addition to UV-C, they make a lot of UV-A and UV-B, which can cause harm to humans.”

The cost of these roaming hospital sterilizers – that are based on high-current mercury discharge lamps – is too high for deployment at the scale that may be needed to combat the coronavirus, present everywhere from cruise ships to meatpacking plants. Barty said that Blu-ray diode lasers offer a potential path to a compact, economical solution, since the technology is ubiquitous and priced in the range of tens of dollars per unit.

His team is developing a way to halve the wavelength of photons emitted by Blu-ray diodes – which is around 405 nanometers – to the germicidal UV-C band.

“This is really more of an applied physics versus a pure physics view of the world,” he said. “The issue is not whether you can make UV-C light. It’s whether you can fundamentally reduce the dollar-per-watt output of a device to a place that it becomes compelling to use UV-C light.”

According to Barty, Blu-ray sterilizers could be made in the “same kind of quantities as you can make other telecommunications components, so you could really change the game.”

Looking at the current landscape, in which there’s an all-hands-on-deck effort to develop vaccines to prevent COVID-19 infections and drugs to treat people sick with the virus, Barty observed: “I would prefer that we just destroy it.”

This project and many other currently active UCI-based initiatives to confront the coronavirus are being tracked at https://oc-covid19.org.

Read the full UCI press release.

Jason Chen awarded SPIE Optics and Photonics Education Scholarship

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BELLINGHAM, Washington, USA – May 14, 2020 – Jason Chen has been awarded a 2020 Optics and Photonics Education Scholarship by SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, for his potential contributions to the field of optics, photonics or related field.

Chen is a Ph.D. candidate in the Functional Optical Coherence Tomography Lab led by Professor Zhongping Chen at the University of California, Irvine (USA). He closely collaborates with Professors Brian Wong and Andrew Browne on developing innovative methods to functionally assess the upper airway and the eye, respectively, via optical approaches. Chen’s academic achievements are well-recognized as he is a fellow of the National Science Foundation – Graduate Research Fellowship Program and an awardee of the Student Research Grant sponsored by the American Society for Laser Medicine and Surgery.

View the SPIE 2020 Scholarship Recipients press release.

Medtronic Acquires Cove Tenant Laser Associated Sciences

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Medtronic, an international medical device company, recently acquired Laser Associated Sciences (LAS), a tenant at the Cove @ UCI, from Auctus Global Capital, an investment firm that focuses on investing in emerging growth life science companies. Formed at UC Irvine’s Beckman Laser Institute (BLI) and Medical Clinic in 2015, LAS developed noninvasive medical devices for healthcare applications, such as blood flow monitors for medical conditions like peripheral artery disease (PAD).

“Auctus likes to partner with innovative companies and executive teams where we can provide strategic guidance, resources and expertise,” said Shiv Grewal, co-founder and managing member of Auctus Global Capital. “The LAS team executed flawlessly and we’re confident they will continue to thrive at Medtronic.”

While at BLI, LAS served as a consultant for the Cove’s prototyping lab and joined the space once the Cove opened. As Cove tenants, the LAS team utilized the prototyping lab to develop device models and the co-working space for meetings and networking opportunities.

“We have found it to be very beneficial operating within the Cove ecosystem,” said Grewal. “After our investment in LAS, we moved the company to offices next to us at the Cove, which enabled us to have real-time interaction with the LAS team. In essence, the Cove was effectively an incubator we used for LAS – we contributed the capital and strategic input, while the Cove provided the office space and laboratory.”

While LAS was at the Cove, the startup received 510(k) FDA clearance for their device, the FlowMet-R, a light-based technology that measures peripheral blood flow to detect potentially life-threatening issues like PAD.

Read full UCI Beall Applied Innovation article

How to Make a Ventilator

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…For the most part, the various open-source initiatives underway make no claims that they’re building critical-care ventilators. Govind Rajan, an anesthesiologist at UC Irvine’s medical school and a contributor to the Bridge Ventilator Consortium ventilator project, described the use-case for that project as “only in situations where you don’t have any ventilators available and the patient needs a ventilator.” In collaboration with the consortium, Virgin Orbit has designed a ventilator of the “automating-a-manual-resuscitator” variety. It’s nowhere near as complex as a critical care ventilator.

However, Rajan also described scenarios where “there comes a time when you have to be weaned off a ventilator,” and said his team’s design could serve the needs of patients who need to be weaned off and don’t need a critical-care device (i.e., acting as a “bridge” between critical care needs and being off of the ventilator). On its website, Virgin Orbit also describes the ventilator (which has still not been approved by the FDA) as potentially serving “the huge volume of patients with moderate COVID-19 symptoms.”

This seemingly contradictory description—a ventilator that’s somehow both a worst-case-scenario only option and serving an intermediate stage of COVID-19 treatment—introduces a serious medical ethics question in the drive for more ventilators. For doctors trying to save patients by any means necessary, a minimum viable ventilator is better than having no ventilator at all. Rajan recalled his own experiences when he began his career working in India 35 years ago, where ventilators were often in short supply and manual resuscitation was sometimes the only option for keeping a patient breathing. Getting to choose between the last-resort tool and a critical care device is a privilege that some doctors just don’t have right now…

Read more of the Vice article.

He was building rockets. Now he’s taking on America’s ventilator shortage

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Austin, Texas (CNN Business) – Victor Radulescu thought he would never see another ventilator.

Early on in his career, the young engineer spent a year helping to design the breathing assistance machines at Medtronic, a medical device manufacturer. But then, about four years ago, he made a switch and joined rocket startup Virgin Orbit. He’s since spent the past few years helping to design a 70-foot rocket that could launch from beneath the wing of a 747 airplane and deliver small satellites into outer space.

“I was completely enamored,” Radulescu, 29, said of his newfound work in avionics.

Then, the coronavirus pandemic struck. And by mid-March, Covid-19 was spreading rapidly across the United States.

Virgin Orbit was granted “essential business” status, the company said, because of its partnerships with NASA and the Defense Department. But first, its factory in Long Beach, California, would shut down for a week for a deep cleaning.

Employees headed home, and the mission of firing satellites into space seemed to lose some of its urgency. A few engineers, including Virgin Orbit CEO Dan Hart, wondered how the company might help address looming medical supply shortages that threatened to overwhelm the health care community.

That’s when Radulescu received the call to help. Virgin Orbit propulsion engineer Kevin Zagorski remembered that Radulescu used to work for Medtronic (MDT), one of only a handful of companies in the world that makes hospital-grade ventilators.

Could Virgin Orbit make ventilators, too? Zagorski asked him.

“In these conversations, my mind — it’s like a switch flipped,” Radulescu said. “I was all ventilators again.”

By the next day, Radulescu and Zagorski were on a call with a group of US doctors that had organized under the name Bridge Ventilator Consortium. The two engineers heard the doctors chatting excitedly about designs for simple breathing machines that could, in theory, be quickly manufactured on a large scale.

Within 15 hours, Virgin Orbit had put an ad hoc team together and built a prototype, Radulescu said.

What the Virgin Orbit team came up with is a far less sophisticated machine than the ventilators Radulescu used to help design at Medtronic. But, if doctors run out of options, these so-called “bridge ventilators” could help thousands of Covid-19 patients who begin to lose the ability to breathe on their own, freeing up more sophisticated ventilators for the most critical cases.

Under pressure

Manufacturers around the world — including Ford, General Motors, Dyson and Xerox — have been adopting wartime-like efforts to scale up ventilator production. Some are helping medical device makers build more of their devices. Others, like Virgin Orbit, are trying to quickly put together new designs.

But it’s a race against time. US hospitals could need as many as half a million additional ventilators during the pandemic, according to the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

Radulescu knew from his one-year stint at Medtronic that quickly building thousands of traditional ventilators — the kind typically used by intensive care doctors — wasn’t feasible.

“I had an appreciation for how complex and sophisticated these devices are,” Radulescu said. “We were immediately aware that we would not be able to recreate or replace them.”

So, Virgin Orbit decided to design its own.

Radulescu notes that there is some overlap in the engineering of ventilators and rockets. The same math and physics apply to pressure — whether it’s the pressure of a rocket fuel combustion chamber or the pressure ventilators use to push oxygen into a patient’s lungs. But the scale is radically different: Rocket engineers think about pressure in terms of pounds per square inch, a unit 70 times larger than the one used in the medica equipment world.

Radulescu also understood that making life-supporting medical equipment required exhaustive testing. But things are no different in rocketry.

“In some ways, the level of testing and verification we have to meet for aerospace are much more stringent than what I had seen in [the medical device field],” Radulescu added. After all, “our electronics have to work in the vacuum of space, being bombarded by solar and cosmic radiation at extreme temperature ranges.”

A call to action

As the coronavirus outbreak spread into the United States, Dr. Brian Wong, a plastic surgeon at the University of California, Irvine Medical Center, wanted to know what doctors on the front lines could do if they ran out of ventilators. In March, Wong organized daily conference calls on Zoom to brainstorm ideas with a couple of his colleagues, and they adopted the name Bridge Ventilator Consortium. Soon, medical professionals from all over the country began dialing in.

Many of their discussions centered on Ambu bags, which are cheap, barrel-shaped devices commonly stocked in emergency rooms and ambulances. They’re used to resuscitate people who stop breathing. The problem is that physicians have to manually operate the device by squeezing down on the bag, making them an impractical solution for COVID-19 patients who may need breathing assistance for weeks at a time.

The BVC doctors had heard about a group of engineers in Spain with a plan to automate that process: Using a windshield wiper motor, they rigged a machine that could act like a human thumb, pressing down on the Ambu bag over and over.

Dr. Wong hoped a few US manufacturers could build a similar device. But he didn’t expect a 20-something rocket scientist from Long Beach to be among the first to answer that call.

“Patients are not motors; they’re not rockets; they’re not satellites,” Wong said. “But when you have an incredible engineering team like that, they get up to speed very quickly.”

After their first call with the BVC doctors, Radulescu and Zagorski used a white board at Virgin Orbit’s rocket factory and engineering software they typically used for rockets, to crunch numbers and sketch out a design.

The next morning, they purchased a windshield wiper motor from Autozone and met up with two more of their colleagues for a marathon engineering session. They designed the machine to use as few components as possible and relied on parts that Virgin Orbit could easily find in large numbers.

But Radulescu said he also knew it wouldn’t be safe to create a device that only did the bare minimum.

“If the goal is to allow the clinician to set this machine up and walk away, we should add different alarms and warnings,” Radulescu said. “One thing I’d seen on other ventilators is, if the power disconnects, the [device] will actually [make] an extremely loud and audible signal that says, ‘Hey, you’ve lost power here!'”

The team assembled its first prototype within a day, and less than a week later they built a second and third version and sent the design to US regulators for approval, Radulescu said.

“I was amazed.” Dr. Govind Rajan, an anesthesiologist at UCI, said. “They took all these ideas, synthesized them and they put it together very fast — which is what is critical right now.”

From prototype to production

Some Virgin Orbit employees are still focused on rockets. A skeleton staff continues to work toward the company’s first orbital launch attempt in the coming weeks. But the startup estimates it can also churn out 100 bridge ventilators within a week, double that rate a week later, and continue scaling up from there. Virgin Orbit says the devices could be manufactured on assembly lines set up right alongside the rocket bodies and engines that litter its 180,000 square-foot factory.

The company said the vast majority of its employees are working from home, and those who must be on site at the factory will maintain proper social distancing whenever possible.

Radulescu, who said the ventilator team has been careful to keep their distance while in the same room together, said they are still working out how to avoid potential kinks in its supply chain, particularly when it comes to the Ambu bags.

“We want to make sure we’re not in a position where we’re competing with hospitals,” he said. His team is planning to deliver its first batch of ventilators fully assembled, and then allowing hospitals to buy the Ambu bags themselves. The machine is designed to allow doctors to install the bags into the bridge ventilator machine when needed.

But before mass production can start, Virgin Orbit needs the green light from the Food and Drug Administration.

The agency said last month that it wanted to do everything possible to expedite approvals for such devices, and Will Pomerantz, Virgin Orbit’s vice president of special projects, said regulators are helping the startup navigate the application process.

That work is ongoing, and Pomerantz isn’t sure when final word may come. The FDA did not respond to a request for comment.

The agency has to walk a fine line — balancing the urgent need to get lifesaving devices in the hands of doctors, and ensuring stopgap solutions are still safe.

Meanwhile, doctors all over the world fear shortages would force them to choose which patients to save.

“There is no ideal solution,” Wong said. He added that bridge ventilators are among dozens of proposed alternatives to traditional ventilators — and nobody yet knows how effective any given approach will be.

There are promising signs in Spain, where Ambu bag ventilators were successfully tested on pigs, received approval for clinical trials and are now being used on Covid-19 patients at several Spanish hospitals, according to Protofy, the engineering firm behind the bridge ventilator design.

It’s not yet clear if any of those patients have since recovered from the virus.

For all their efforts, the Virgin Orbit engineers say they hope doctors will never be forced to use their machines. But they’re still working tirelessly, Radulescu said, adding that looming medical supply shortages felt like “a call to action.”

Read the CNN Business article.

Medtronic Buys Device Maker

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Irvine-based Laser Associated Sciences, Inc. (LAS) has been acquired by Medtronic Plc on undisclosed terms.

LAS was previously based at The Cove at UCI Beall Applied Innovation and funded by Newport Beach-based Auctus Global Capital.

The company received FDA clearance for its blood flow monitoring device, the FlowMet-R, in January. It said it will continue to focus on innovative treatments for vascular diseases.

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