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View Winners → NASA Develops COVID-19 Prototype Ventilator
News May 01, 2020
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A new high-pressure ventilator developed by NASA engineersand tailored to treat coronavirus (COVID-19) patients passed a critical testTuesday at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, anepicenter of COVID-19 in the United States.
The device, called VITAL (Ventilator Intervention TechnologyAccessible Locally), was developed by engineers at NASA’s Jet PropulsionLaboratory in Southern California to free up the nation’s limited supply oftraditional ventilators so they may be used on patients with the most severeCOVID-19 symptoms.
“We specialize in spacecraft, not medical-devicemanufacturing,” said JPL Director Michael Watkins. “But excellentengineering, rigorous testing and rapid prototyping are some of ourspecialties. When people at JPL realized they might have what it takes tosupport the medical community and the broader community, they felt it was theirduty to share their ingenuity, expertise and drive.”
NASA next is seeking expedited FDA approval for the devicevia an emergency use authorization, a fast-track approval process developed forcrisis situations that takes just days rather than years. To get input from agold-standard medical facility, JPL delivered a prototype of the device to theHuman Simulation Lab in the Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and PainMedicine at Mount Sinai for additional testing.
“We were very pleased with the results of the testingwe performed in our high-fidelity human simulation lab,” said Dr. MatthewLevin, Director of Innovation for the Human Simulation Lab and Associate Professorof Anesthesiology, Preoperative and Pain Medicine, and Genetics and GenomicsSciences at the Icahn School of Medicine. “The NASA prototype performed asexpected under a wide variety of simulated patient conditions. The team feelsconfident that the VITAL ventilator will be able to safely ventilate patientssuffering from COVID-19 both here in the United States and throughout theworld.”
VITAL can be built faster and maintained more easily than atraditional ventilator, and is composed of far fewer parts, many of which arecurrently available to potential manufacturers through existing supply chains.Its flexible design means it also can be modified for use in field hospitalsbeing set up in convention centers, hotels, and other high-capacity facilitiesacross the country and around the globe.
Like all ventilators, VITAL requires patients to be sedatedand an oxygen tube inserted into their airway to breathe. The new devicewouldn’t replace current hospital ventilators, which can last years and arebuilt to address a broader range of medical issues. Instead, VITAL is intendedto last three to four months and is specifically tailored for COVID-19patients.
“Intensive care units are seeing COVID-19 patients whorequire highly dynamic ventilators,” said Dr. J.D. Polk, NASA’s chiefhealth and medical officer. “The intention with VITAL is to decrease thelikelihood patients will get to that advanced stage of the disease and requiremore advanced ventilator assistance.”
The Office of Technology Transfer and Corporate Partnershipsat Caltech, which manages JPL for NASA, will offer a free license for VITAL andcurrently is reaching out to the commercial medical industry to findmanufacturers for the device.
To learn more about how NASA is helping in the national response to COVID-19, visit nasa.gov/coronavirus.
