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.

Read Orange County Business Journal news

UCI Engineers Collaborate to Attack Virus

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As devastating as the coronavirus has been worldwide, the pandemic has ignited a can-do spirit in the UCI Samueli School of Engineering. Faculty, graduate students and staff researchers are rolling up their sleeves, working in labs, homes and garages in an effort to help. From diagnostic strips to makeshift ventilators to antibody detection techniques, engineers are collaborating across disciplines to create devices and treatments that they hope can mitigate the crisis.

Read full UCI Samueli School of Engineering press release.

California lends 500 ventilators to 4 states, 2 territories

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Virgin Orbit, billionaire Richard Branson’s company that makes rockets, has developed a prototype for a “bridge ventilator” designed to help patients breathe until they can be put on a traditional ventilator. The company is awaiting federal approval before it can begin mass producing the model, which was developed in partnership with researchers at the University of California, Irvine.

Read full Associated Press article.

Virgin Orbit Testing Prototype Ventilators

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Virgin Orbit is pivoting its resources to test a prototype ventilator that could be potentially cheaper and just as effective for most patients. Patrick Healy reports for the NBC4 News at 5 p.m. on Friday, April 3, 2020.

Watch NBC4 News broadcast.

UCI Team Initiates Effort to Build ‘Bridge’ Ventilators

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Quick-to-produce devices could help alleviate hospital shortages during COVID-19 crisis

UCI News, Irvine, Calif., April 1, 2020 – The call has gone out: Overtaxed hospitals need more ventilators for the growing number of COVID-19 patients. And a UCI School of Medicine team is working with corporate and university collaborators around the country to help provide them.

UCI surgeon Brian Wong and anesthesiologist Govind Rajan are partnering with Tom Milner, acting director of the Beckman Laser Institute & Medical Clinic, to conceive and drive the design and creation of what they call a “bridge” ventilator. It’s an inexpensive, quick-to-manufacture device to be employed when intensive care units are overwhelmed and no standard ICU ventilators are available for patients undergoing respiratory failure.

“The need for ventilators is a medical Dunkirk,” says Wong, who has a joint appointment as professor of biomedical engineering in the Samueli School of Engineering. “It’s a once-in-a-generation call to arms that we all must respond to. 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.”

In simple terms, these bridge ventilators replace human-operated “bag valve masks,” low-cost, widely available ambulance staples used to manually ventilate patients. The version the UCI team conceived has a mechanical attachment that automates the pumping function.

To accelerate the design and construction of their device, the UCI team has established the Bridge Ventilator Consortium, which includes engineers and business consultants from the University of Texas, Virgin Orbit and Medline Industries.

The prototype that’s moving into the manufacturing phase was designed and built by Milner’s lab at UT Austin (where he currently has a faculty appointment in engineering), in collaboration with UCI clinicians and biomedical and mechanical engineers.

The ventilator is constructed from industrial components that are extremely reliable. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of a conventional medical ventilator (the core of the prototype, for instance, is a Toyota windshield wiper motor) but will have the minimum safety profile for regulatory approval.

“We have put the system through rigorous testing,” Milner says. “We are now pursuing regulatory review by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and if all goes well, our ventilator will be ready for production very soon.”

In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, the FDA recently streamlined the regulatory process for new devices such as the UCI bridge ventilator.

Milner adds that the FDA-approved design will be freely available to all manufacturers and that the Bridge Ventilator Consortium is in discussions with several companies to produce the units. Virgin Orbit has already committed to making a version of them.

In addition, representatives from the states of California, Hawaii and New York have reached out to learn more about accessing the bridge ventilators.

“While UCI has become the incubator for this project, what’s remarkable is that almost everyone – engineers, physicians, industry leaders – is opting into this consortium as volunteers and freely sharing intellectual property,” Wong says. “This is 100 percent open source for the public’s benefit. It’s a gathering of smart, selfless, well-intentioned people. And it’s actually no surprise that UCI has become the hub, as we have a proud tradition of collaboration and innovation.”

View the video of an early prototype.

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program Awardees

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Congratulations to Luciano Groisman of Dr. Elliot Botvinick’s lab and Thinh Phan of Dr. Bernard Choi’s lab for being awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship! This federal award is one of the most preeminent honors that young scholars can receive.

Read more on the UCI Graduate Division website.