Image: Gabby Jones for The New York Times
Marcel Botha SMArchS ‘06 was featured in the New York Times for his work to develop a ventilator to assist hospitals dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic.
The text below is excerpted from the New York Times. Read the original here.
The nudge came in an email in early March from an Italian friend alarmed by how fast the deadly coronavirus was spreading in his country.
A shortage of ventilators, he told Scott Cohen and Marcel Botha, was a critical problem in Italy, and he warned that it soon would be in the United States, too. He urged the pair to apply their skills to the ventilator challenge.
Both Mr. Cohen, co-founder of a technology center for researchers and start-ups, and Mr. Botha, chief executive of a product design and development company, were skeptical. A standard ventilator, with thousands of parts requiring a complex global supply chain, was hardly a device that could be manufactured quickly and affordably.
“I was dismissive at first,” said Mr. Botha, whose company is called 10XBeta. “It looked impossible.”
But they soon found a design for a basic ventilator that could serve as their core technology. Since then, they have orchestrated from New York a far-flung collaboration of scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, physicians and regulatory experts and accomplished in a month what would normally take a year or more.
The result are machines known as “bridge” ventilators, or automatic resuscitators, priced at $3,300. They are mainly meant to help less critically ill patients breathe. If patients become sicker, with lung function more compromised by the disease, they still need to be placed on standard ventilators, which typically cost more than $30,000.
On Friday, the Food and Drug Administration approved the new device, the Spiro Wave, to be used on patients in hospitals, under an expedited process called emergency use authorization.
Read the rest of the article here.