Lots of people are asking me what we are doing about Covid19 and I’ve only been on here sporadically. We’ve been busy but we haven’t been alone (1/n)

Our team has been mix of remote work and onsite and home, based on their family needs

Turns out that years of having to standup pop labs in hotel rooms in Ethiopia and Nicaragua makes our Charlestown apartment feel like the @TheCrick

On the frontline side, we have a group of hospitals around the country and abroad that we’re working to run @makerhealthco Cloud sprints that allow to ship COVID19 construction kits to nurses and doctors and allow them run experiments

We can’t just 3DP our way out of this one. The clinicians need to space and support to figure out what works best and what’s possible, without waiting for “second wave solutions” months from now when the original brilliant idea finally passes traditional vetting & publication

So we are giving them their own custom kits — @annakyoung and @nikalbarran have been at this for a few years and have perfected the method

This is in addition to the medical makerspaces we have embedded in hospitals via @makerhealthco

Last week this approach pushed out a modular mask design called the Olson, after legendary 1940s maker nurse Lyla Olson

This led to running more sessions with partners in Spain, Boston, Santiago, Cedar Rapids, Texas and Dakar. That’s not counting the random WhatsApps ours phones are exploding with from Managua, Tegucigalpa, India, and like everywhere my high school friends live

We are learning a lot about what’s working and what’s not. We’ve established a hotline at @makerhealthco for clinical providers to call in and have prototyping triage with teams that’s experienced physician-nurse driven fabrication and design http://MakerHealth.co/covid19 

Embedded health making has never been so important. It’s yielded accelerated solutions. Some are straightforward like this smart hand sanitizer attachment

Our Prototyping Triage means that we are up at 4am ET because it’s mañana in Canarias and Madrid and catching on SF partners late at night.

What’s Prototyping Triage? It’s basically that Apollo 13 moment in a box. It’s yielding some patient impact devices such as this hybrid 3D print respiration circuit that a nurse in Madrid created and is now saving lots of patients from descending into ventilator care

We are now working with that hospital on how they best diffuse the parts.

There’s respiratory circuits, PPE, remote management of devices and preventative care for non #COVID19 patients whose care is disrupted.

And like everyone else, we see this urge for every 3D printer to the wards scenario. I have some thoughts on that. It’s not all good but I realize part of it some chicken soup for the maker soul.

The best thing we can do is build *fast* and get it in front of a clinical decision maker.

That’s not going to happen in your google doc. You need like a doc doc. Or a nurse. Or an RT.

Or someone that actually takes care of patients. Else=noise. But it’s a cultural wakeup

On the science side we have some great partners. We are activating our OpenDx and FairTradeBio initiatives in the EU with our Spanish partners in Canarias as a template for others to follow.

That’s a FairTrade vial which creates a new type of social contract between researchers and sample donations. This is where patients get recognized, rewarded, and involved for producing those antibodies, for yielding those biomarkers, for producing that life saving plasma.

We are working with field sites far away from Boston such as Senegal and Santiago to deploy Ampli blocks ready for point of care dx biomarker exploration. It’s flipping the model so that we don’t get their blood. They get our tech.

Using http://OpenDiagnostics.EU  protocols we are sharing our approach to find signatures in discarded noisy antibodies that repurpose as COVID19 rapid diagnostics.

We are not selling this.

We are showing everyone how to do this.

Lots of telescopes pointed at the same star

We have some great collaborations such as @KHamadLab @DrKlapperich @SanidadGobCan @iClinicoMadrid @ingenieriaUDD_ and many more

All those RNA extraction challenges you read about? Cathie @DrKlapperich has been working on for years and recently led this paper with us https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.14.991893v1

Which is a way to extract RNA from whole blood while Kim @KHamadLab has been fine tuning paper diagnostics so we can recycle available tools into viral reporters https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.17.995738v1

we’re busy// sadly not so much on Twitter. If y want to help us or chip in to support unfunded efforts, send us an email.

The science is all bootstrapped. We were working on making meds & biorobots before this hit! For asap help an MD/RN/RT out. They are the real soldiers.

If you want to follow some other folks that are fighting the good fight and help their work, checkout @ruben__garcia @cdomtru @sikeslab @PrakashLab @florian_krammer @criparis @jac_linnes

I think I figured out how to do this thread. Apologies if I didn't figure it out.