Engineering solutions to COVID-19 challenges

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Engineers like to solve problems. For many, the bigger the better. So it comes as no surprise that while most engineering R&D is on hiatus with the closure of campus, several faculty and staff from The Ohio State University College of Engineering are enlisting in the fight against COVID-19.

From biomedical research to manufacturing collaborations, Buckeye engineers are applying their ingenuity, expertise and community spirit to answer the call.

Manufacturing medical equipment

The Center for Design and Manufacturing Excellence (CDME) and Institute for Materials Research (IMR) are collaborating with the U.S. Army, Harvard, University of South Florida, Desktop Metal, Formlabs and HP, among others, to develop, test and implement a strategy to produce COVID-19 test swabs, supplies of which are running dangerously low.

CDME and IMR are working on the design and testing, as well as leading the effort to find local manufacturers that are certified to produce medical grade swabs to support the Wexner Medical Center and the surrounding community’s needs.

Testing innovation

Professor Perena Gouma’s group is developing an inexpensive COVID-19 breathalyzer device that will sample a single exhaled breath for two key biomarkers of the infection. This research builds upon her invention of a hand-held breath monitor that may provide early detection of flu before symptoms appear prior to her arrival at Ohio State.

“We are fortunate at Ohio State to have a College of Veterinary Medicine with vast experience with zoonoses that are transmitted to humans,” said Gouma. “I have been collaborating with Dr. Andrew Bowman to carry out animal studies—collecting breath samples from swine infected with influenza and beta-coronaviruses—to validate the device before we deploy it to humans.”

Gouma has a joint appointment as professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. She also is director of the Advanced Ceramics Research Laboratory at Ohio State.

Gouma expects the non-invasive diagnostic tool to enable not only early detection of the infection, but also offer insight on progress of the disease and its severity. She is currently in talks with both government and industry leaders.

Pivoting to vaccines

The labs of Biomedical Engineering Professors Daniel Gallego-Perez and Natalia Higuita-Castro are developing novel, highly benign and targeted methods for the delivery of mRNA vaccines. While the researchers normally focus on cancer and regenerative medicine, their methods may be applicable to vaccine development and deployment.

“We are working on developing approaches to deliver mRNA vaccines to specific cell types in a highly targeted manner,” said Gallego-Perez. “Once we find the right approach, we will engage experts on COVID-19 to possibly transition this research into the right arena for subsequent efficacy studies.”

Bits and bytes join the fight

Ness Shroff, an Ohio Eminent Scholar in Networking and Communications, is applying his expertise on several fronts. He and Computer Science and Engineering Professor Dong Xuan are developing a privacy-protective crowdsensing app for contact tracing, a focused strategy for breaking transmission chains and controlling the spread of disease. The idea would be to supplement this fine-grained contact tracing with other available data to build out a meaningful model to predict spread, assess risk and estimate resources needed.

“The goal is to build out a bare-bones version of this technology and roll out the first version of the app in the next two to three weeks,” said Shroff.

Shroff is also discussing machine learning approaches to infection testing with the National Science Foundation (NSF) and federal agencies. “There are some learning theoretical tools that can be leveraged to develop simple efficient algorithms that I think could be potentially helpful,” he said.

From epidemic to pandemic

With College of Public Health Assistant Professor Ayaz Hyder, Computer Science and Engineering Professors Raghu Machiraju and Anish Arora are leveraging an NSF-funded project titled “BD Spoke: Community-Driven Data Engineering for Opioid and Substance Abuse in the Rural Midwest” to include a focus on the COVID-19 pandemic. The overarching goal of the project is to create data platforms and ecosystems to address spreading epidemics. The OpenCOVID data commons will host datasets and tools that are especially relevant to the local and regional public health agencies. Project partners include Nationwide Children’s Hospital, University of Chicago and University of South Carolina.

All three professors are faculty affiliates of Ohio State’s Translational Data Analytics Institute.

Grassroots solutions

On March 15, the Columbus tech and business community started talking about the idea of a virtual hackathon in response to the COVID-19 situation. CantStopCBUS was born. OHI/O and Ohio State Hackathon Director Julia Armstrong has been involved on the volunteer organizing team since that Sunday, recruiting hundreds of Ohio State students, faculty and alumni to build solutions. Along with Materials Science and Engineering Professor Glenn Daehn, she also is leading a project within the community focused on production of personal protective equipment (PPE).

Daehn has been leading discussions on how to keep essential workers safe, and a clear consensus emerged from the group of engineering and healthcare professionals he convened: a "Masks for All" policy can have a significant effect in slowing community transmission. This should be done with simple cloth masks that do not take stocks away from healthcare workers and strict hand hygiene in addition to all pertinent CDC guidelines. 


This update was originally shared by The Ohio State University College of Engineering on April 2, 2020. More developments on this front are in the pipeline, and we will keep you updated through the CDME and College of Engineering news pages.

Category: Research
Tag: COVID-19