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 On the call, leaders from the Illinois RapidVent
team explained they had built a prototype of an emergency ventilator
to address a nationwide shortage amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Laboratory testing looked promising, but the University of Illinois
team wanted to understand whether the device worked in animals.
Wheeler, who has built and tested lifesaving medical devices in
animals, was the obvious choice to join the team.
Within a week, Wheeler wrote a protocol; obtained approval from the
Illinois Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC);
assembled his team, supplies, and animals; and had completed the
first 24-hour tests of the ventilator. A few tweaks and a few days
later, final testing was complete.
The RapidVent worked.
“If this device saves one person, we did our job. Hopefully it'll
save a whole lot more than that,” says Wheeler, professor in the
Department of Animal Sciences at U of I and affiliate in the
Department of Bioengineering, Department of Veterinary Clinical
Medicine, Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, Beckman
Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, and the Carle
Illinois College of Medicine.
Wheeler’s team tested the device in pigs, widely recognized as the
non-primate mammals most physiologically similar to humans.
“Typically the size pig we use for this kind of work is somewhere in
the 200- to 250-pound range. The lungs of those pigs are about the
same size as a 150-pound human,” Wheeler says.
The team – in head-to-toe personal protective equipment – humanely
sedated, intubated, and monitored the pigs as the RapidVent took
over the job of breathing. The first test ran for three hours, just
to make sure the setup worked. The next step was testing the device
on multiple pigs for a full 24-hour period. Using data from these
tests, the RapidVent team made a few critical adjustments to the
prototype. A few days later, a final four-hour stint rounded out the
testing.
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The device is designed for short-term, emergency
respiratory support in hospitals when regular ventilators are not
available. First responders also can hook the device to an oxygen
tank to breathe for rural patients during long treks to the nearest
hospital.
The product’s need and impact show little sign of slowing down. More
than 50 companies have now licensed the design for the Illinois
RapidVent and are exploring manufacturing options. When the time
comes, Wheeler’s team and his pigs stand ready to test a commercial
product.
Wheeler points to the College of Agricultural, Consumer and
Environmental Sciences’ (ACES) Imported Swine Research Lab (ISRL)
for the experiment’s rapid-turnaround success.
“We could do this so fast because we were already set up with
animals and a state-of-the-art biomedical unit managed by the animal
sciences department in the College of ACES. Had we not had that
facility there, there's no way we could have done it as quickly as
we did,” he says.
Pigs from the ISRL have helped test devices that have saved infants
and rebuilt facial bones of injured soldiers, outcomes Wheeler is
proud of. But his primary gig is agriculture. Broadly, he and his
team work to improve production characteristics in swine and cattle
using advanced tools such as gene editing, embryo transfer, and stem
cell therapies.
Wheeler’s foundation in agriculture led him to leap with both feet
into a project that could save human lives.
“I signed up in ag more than 40 years ago to feed people, to take
care of people, and help people who needed help,” Wheeler says. “And
so this is just another example of stepping up where we could help;
we were ready when the call came in. That's what we do in
agriculture, and what we do in the College of ACES.”
[Source: Matt Wheeler
News writer: Lauren Quinn] |
