In the Beth Israel consortium, Carbon, a maker of 3-D printers, has teamed up with Resolution Medical, a Minneapolis-based maker of medical devices, to produce nasopharyngeal swabs. Medical experts, including members of a Stanford Health Care task force, helped develop that swab model using material ordinarily used for dental implants.
“The idea captured our imagination,” so Stanford fast-tracked its own study of the swab prototype, said Sridhar Seshadri, vice president of cancer, cardiovascular, radiology and transplant for Stanford Health Care. “This is going into somebody’s nostrils, so you have to be super safe.”
When the task force tried to sterilize the first batch of swabs from Resolution Medical, disaster struck. The sample swabs came out of the autoclave, a machine that sterilizes medical equipment with heat, visibly bent. The task force sent a photo of the results and soon learned that 3-D-printed swabs have to be inserted into autoclaves horizontally or they can melt.
“Then it was nail-biting for a few hours to see if the swabs came out right the next round, and they did,” Seshadri said.
Resolution Medical is now producing 100,000 this week using Carbon’s 3-D printers and is planning to expand capacity to more than 1 million in future weeks.
Arnaout said that one advantage of having an array of swab makers is that if one has a supply problem, the entire chain is less likely to break down.
HP, formerly known as Hewlett-Packard, learned of Beth Israel Deaconess’s plight because Annette Friskopp, global head and general manager of HP Specialty Printing Systems, had worked with hospital leaders. She and Lihua Zhao, head of the 3-D lab at HP Labs, coordinated the push for a new swab. A research and development lab in San Diego, one of three that HP has worldwide, was redirected to solve the problem.
“Within 48 hours, we had designed, printed, and shipped the prototypes for testing,” Zhao said in an email.
Unlike the other prototype makers, though, HP isn’t going to manufacture them itself. It is in late-stage talks with its partners and customers for them to start making the swabs.
Arnaout at Beth Israel said the hospital has been working to iron out other supply shortages. At one point, it looked as though the hospital would run out of the vials and fluid used to transport swabs to testing facilities. The fluid recipe was online. And when the hospital ran out of the vials, it found other tubes the same size. Hospital volunteers began adding fluid to tubes “to the tune of thousands of tubes a week,” Arnaout said. “We turned into a little factory here at Beth Israel.”
Another new swab producer is Origin, a San Francisco-based company providing software engineering to users of 3-D printers, among other things.
But when city residents were ordered to stay home, Origin’s 40 employees, deemed nonessential, turned to solving supply problems, in one case adapting snorkeling masks and filters to protect health workers. When it learned about the Boston hospital’s quest, the firm jumped in.
Now, a month later, it has become a medical device manufacturer that has passed a clinical trial test and is regulated by the FDA. Instead of delivering some 3-D printers to customers, Origin is using them to make swabs. Soon, it will be producing more than a million a week.
“If you told me a month ago that this is what our company would be doing and this is where we’d be, I’d have thought you were crazy,” said Chris Prucha, the Michigan-born chief executive of Origin. “But here we are.”
