Lori Walsh: What if you could wear a mask that trapped and inactivated the novel coronavirus? South Dakota State University assistant mechanical engineering professor Saikat Basu has a vision of a mask with a reusable respirator. He's a member of a team of multi-institutional researchers that will design and develop the respirator with support from the National Science Foundation's funding mechanism. He joins us now with more on the vision. Professor Basu, welcome. Thanks for being here.
Saikat Basu: Thank you.
Lori Walsh: Talk a little bit about the inspiration for this because obviously there is a great need and there will be a great demand. How do you start looking for a great solution?
Saikat Basu: For the mask that we are trying to design, we got inspired from the animal world. There are some animals who are better at smelling than us and what they have is a much more complicated nasal airway that can trap all the droplets from the air. We are trying to have a design that is inspired from nasal airways in animals like pigs, dogs. And then along with that, while ensuring that we trap the droplets from the inhaled air, we have a layer of copper filters. We have seen that there have been some studies on coronavirus that have tested their effect of different surfaces. Suppose a coronavirus is residing on a surface made of wood or if it is residing on a surface made of say copper, the copper surface is much more efficient at inactivating the coronavirus. We thought maybe we can change the surface properties inside the mask, in their transmission passage and use copper that would help kill the virus much more efficiently. We are trying to get inspired both from the animal world as well as the papers that have been coming out on COVID-19 over the last few months.
Lori Walsh: How fascinating as a research scientist, as a mechanical engineer, has it been for you to see how quickly people are attacking the problem? It seems slow if you are waiting for some kind of a magic bullet or a green light to go back to life as normal, but the science is actually moving quite quickly isn't it?
Saikat Basu: It is. I'm would say all the scientists are trying to apply their expertise from different angles. I know it is very important that we get a vaccine or we get some kind of a cure. But as an engineering professor we are not active in that area of work. What we are trying to do is to come up with some kind of preventive mechanism, like the mask that we hope we are going to build can help prevent the transmission of this disease in hospitals where the doctors and the nurses are in close contact with the patients. But in terms of what our quality of life is going to be, I think things are going to change a lot over the next few months or perhaps years. Even if we have a vaccine now it will take quite awhile for vaccinating the entire human civilization. There has to be some kind of preventive in the meanwhile so that we can carry on with our daily lives.
Lori Walsh: What kind of work were you doing before, that you were able to pivot to solving this problem or working on a respirator solution?
Saikat Basu: Yeah, that's actually a good question. Although I'm in mechanical engineering, initially I started out doing a lot of fluid mechanics research, but then around five years back, I started as a postdoc at UNC School of Medicine in North Carolina. There I developed models to study airflow through our nose and I developed some numerical models to predict drug delivery inside the nose to predict different kinds of disease progressions. That area of sort of aligned well with the COVID-19 research because here also we are talking about a respiratory disease. I am trying to use my expertise that I have built over the last five years and hopefully I'll be able to contribute in a meaningful way over the next few months.
Lori Walsh: Tell us more about how a dog's nose or a pig's nose works. That is, since you were doing that research, how is it so different from ours that it works on trapping and can be an inspiration from nature for a problem like this?
Saikat Basu: Yeah, so let's think about our nasal structure. If you think about the internal air space, if you just take a vertical cross section, the picture that we get from a human nose, it's much simplified compared to what we see in a pig nose or in a dog nose. There the air passage is much more torturous, much more complicated. As that animal inhales the air, the air has to go through that tortuous pathway and while doing that, there are some different fluid mechanics nuances that emerge that would help to capture the droplets on the walls of that passage. That's what we are trying to implement here. That kind of geometric complexity would probably help us in capturing the droplets much better than inhaled air than what we have right now in the currently available masks or what happens in our nose.
Lori Walsh: What kind of geometry is, do you have to experiment with different kinds of how you make that filter so that it's the most effective?
Saikat Basu: Yeah, actually we, so as of now, while in getting this NSF funding, I just tested the pig nose, but we know that there are some other animals which can be a good candidate as well. For example, I want to look at dog nose, I want to look at a nasal scans from moose and maybe try out four or five different animals before coming up with the optimal solution for this. Yeah, there is some research that needs to be done in that aspect and figuring out the best possible geometry for our mask.
Lori Walsh: Oh, I think that's fascinating. Tell me who you're working with because this is a not just a South Dakota State University project.
Saikat Basu: It's not just us. Yeah, so we are working with Cornell University, so there the PA is Dr. Sunny Jung, so he's in the biological engineering department. He would help us with collecting the different animal scans and he's supposed to send the scans to us. Over here, I'm going to build the models first on computer around some simulations to figure out the best possible design and then do some 3D printing work to come up with the initial prototypes. And after the 3D printing phase, we are going to work with University of Illinois. There, Dr. Leonardo Chamorro, he's an experimentalist so he's going to run some physical flow experiments in the models that I would build to figure out that whatever we see in the computer world is actually happening in the real world. And then the expectation is to work with some of the others, biosafety level lab units to figure it out how efficient the mask is going to be in actually killing the life COVID-19.
Lori Walsh: It has to be effective, but it also has to be usable for people who are using it and including reusable. What do you anticipate how this mask can be something other than a one shot and throw it away? Can it be cleaned? And how hard is it to sanitize it?
Saikat Basu: It's actually going to be reusable. What we have seen from the papers that have been coming out on COVID-19, typically a copper surface would take around 50 minutes to inactivate the virus. As long as we clean the mask respirator once every day with plain soap and water, I think we should be able to reuse it because otherwise the design is bio inspired, it has nothing sensitive in that sense that it can be used just one. We definitely expect it to be a reusable design.
Lori Walsh: Wow. Tell me about timeframe and how the funding from the National Science Foundation is going to help move something like this forward more quickly than without it.
Saikat Basu: Yeah, so the funding period is actually starting May 1st this year and it's for one year till end of April 2021. What we expect, so as we all know, we are in a crisis, so we need to get some prototypes out very quickly. What we hope is after three or four months, we should have some kind of a prototype which we can test in a lab and we want to use the entire funding period to get the best possible design. But the way, at least as far as I am concerned, we are approaching things in the, so right now we expect that over summer, probably the spread of this disease is going to be stemmed out a little, but it might be back again in fall with the falling temperatures. Our target is to have some kind of technology ready by the time that happens so that we are better prepared to deal with that second peak.
Lori Walsh: What are some of the challenges I had that you anticipate are the biggest problems to solve? What are the choke points or the areas that you're particularly worried about or curious about how quickly that problem can be solved or overcome?
Saikat Basu: Oh, one thing I would say in terms of COVID-19, it's very important that we develop some kind of vaccine, some kind of cure, but that's being led by scientists from other fields. In terms of the work that we are doing, yes, it might help us to get going with our daily lives, but we still need to be very careful as in maintaining social distancing, et cetera. And I wonder how even while using mask, how that is going to affect our daily lives. Maybe using a mask like this with the new technologies would make it better than what we have right now, but I think it's up to research over the next few months as to what we can expect.
Lori Walsh: What are some of the other things that you see in the world that maybe are projects that you're not working on but that you're excited to see other people working on that kind of gives you hope that even though we're living in a new world with a lot of challenges that we are able to arise and meet those challenges through the power of our scientific might. What else do you see out there that gives you confidence?
Saikat Basu: Well, one thing, this coronavirus is just the newest strain of coronavirus. These coronaviruses have been around since the 60s so there have been a lot of research and there had been a lot of research on the earliest strains. As far as I know, people are working on different approaches. For example, this is one of my other projects which can have some relevance as well. In terms of developing a vaccine, some groups are working on intra-nasal vaccines. Basically you push the drug through the nose. Since I'm working on airflow through the nose, I can also help them with coming up with better administration devices for the drugs to make it much more potent in terms of targeting the actual sites for this disease inside the nose. Yeah, there are different ways in which we engineers can help up folks from the other branches of science and I'm looking forward to what we do over the next few months or maybe over the next one year.
Lori Walsh: Right. Oh well, we're looking forward to you coming back and telling us more about this as the research gets a little further along and what that prototype looks like. And it's, these science stories for some people who were really not paying attention, have now become really, really important, and we all know that doctors and healthcare workers are heroes and here are the mechanical engineers as well that are trying solve some of these problems. We really appreciate your time Professor Basu. Thank you so much.
Saikat Basu: Thank you so much for having me.