THEQuad
Then came COVID-19. The shortage of N95 masks that complicated early response in the United States gave Duke a straightforward problem: to decontaminate and reuse face masks that until then had been treated as single-use throwaway items. Antony Schwartz is biological safety officer for Duke University and Duke Health. When it became evident that personal protective equipment shortThe COVID-19 Engineering Response Team tackles ages were going to be serious, he knew that VHP was projects the pandemic throws its way. working at Duke and looked up research on using it for masks. He found a paper by the Battelle Memoriuke has one surprising place to look for al Institute, an applied-science nonprofit, which had its quick response to the COVID-19 in 2016 successfully tested using VHP to treat N95 pandemic: the Ebola outbreak of masks, though nobody had tried it in the real world. 2014-15. It seemed like a good time. Matthew Stiegel, assistant vice presThey did. They outfitted a room with racks for the ident for occupational and environmental safety for masks, used a special biological indicator (a small Duke University and Duke Health, says that during steel disk that contains a million or so spores that are the 2014-15 outbreak Duke was a designated tranmuch smaller and harder to neutralize than the corosition center that might have had to hold an Ebola navirus), and found that the process fully decontaminated the masks, wherever they were in the room. patient in the United States. “We had to prepare just They applied for and received an Emergency Use in case we got someone at Duke and we’d have to Authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Adminhold them for forty-eight hours,” Stiegel recalls. That istration, and they can now decontaminate masks up meant a lot of work figuring out how to completely to ten times. The process seems to work many times decontaminate not just a patient room but also an more (after thirty cycles the straps start to fail), but ambulance. Basically, steaming the environments ten is the limit the FDA authorized. with vaporized hydrogen peroxide (VHP) did the Workers often use masks for only a moment at a trick. Duke had also learned how to similarly decontaminate rooms in the Regional Biocontainment Lab time. Instead of discarding them after a single use, of the Duke Human Vaccine Institute. That meant they put their own mask in a labeled paper bag and they were ready. reuse it during their shift. At the end of the shift they place it in a collection bin. Merely reusing masks is making a difference, and the decontamination multiplies that. They’ve published papers on the technique and procedure they’ve developed and spoken with caregivers all over the world, helping them do the same. It’s not just masks, though. There is at least another dozen or so projects undertaken at Duke to solve the problems COVID-19 has flung its way. Eric Richardson, associate professor of the practice in biomedical engineering, points to the interdisciplinary Design Health program of the Pratt School that brings together people from the schools of business, engineering, and nursing to solve problems in health-care technology. In response to the current crisis, that program transmogrified into the COVID-19 Engineering Response Team, with the help of the Office of Information Technology and other GIVE IT A TRY: Professor Eric Richardson, left, tests a
A pipeline for problem-solving
D
powered, air-purifying respirator device. 10
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