AMHERST — In one of the latest COVID-19 response projects at UMass Amherst, the Advanced Digital Design and Fabrication (ADDFab) laboratory is collaborating with a global network of design, engineering, and manufacturing experts to help develop an open-source N95 face mask.

ADDFab, one of the core facilities at UMass’s Institute for Applied Life Sciences, has been rapidly preparing 3D prints of prototype parts and molds for Cofab Design in Holyoke. Cofab business partner and design engineer Aaron Cantrell is one of the primary leaders of the Open Standard Respirator project, a nonprofit effort to broaden protective equipment supply for COVID-19 and beyond. The other leaders are biomechatronics engineer Matt Carney of the MIT Media Lab Biomechatronics Group and Philip Brown, assistant professor of Biomedical Engineering at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center.

The project grew out of a grassroots desire to address the critical shortage of N95 masks caused by the pandemic. “There was a huge increase in demand that was beyond the ability of existing manufacturers to keep up with in a quick way,” Cantrell said. “There were no designs for people who wanted to chip in and start to help with this problem.”

Cantrell and Cofab’s two other partners, Mike Stone and Jake Horsey, with whom ADDFab has previously worked, needed a prototyping partner that could produce parts overnight and economically for the modular, reusable, filtering facepiece respirator. ADDFab student workers were able to turn around prototype pieces in both laser-sintered nylon and UV-cured polymer the day after the designs were digitally received in the lab.

“This project is a really good fit for our lab,” ADDFab Director David Follette said. “We can use high-end printers to print molds for silicone parts, which have very demanding requirements for accuracy and surface finish.”

Both Follette and Stone agree that the ongoing, local working relationship between ADDFab and Cofab quickly pushed the project forward. “To get prototypes that quickly from a third party or online service bureau would just be astronomically expensive, and then require overnight shipping,” Follette said.

Added Stone, “there was a huge amount of pressure to do this quickly, and we were sprinting to get things done. We had a trusted relationship with someone within driving distance from us who can deliver high-quality components using world-class materials and processes. This was the best-case scenario.”

Among other parts, ADDFab printed the mold tooling for the silicone face piece, allowing Cofab to test it out before committing to expensive metal tooling necessary for mass production.

“By locally 3D printing the molds and testing them quickly, they could be much more confident in their design when beginning to manufacture at scale,” Follette explained.

Cofab used the prototypes to finalize its design of the mask, which is now being field-tested at sites around the world. “It’s free for people who want to produce it,” Stone said. “At the end of the day, we want safe, reliable PPE to be in the hands of more people.”

A nonprofit will hold the license for the respirator design, and the makers will be responsible for seeking any certifications or approvals, if desired.

“On a bigger-picture front,” Stone said, “this is how open-source medical products might be able to work in the future.”

AMHERST — The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that the Mechanical Ventilator Milano (MVM) is safe for use in the U.S. under the FDA’s emergency-use authorization, which helps support public health during the current COVID-19 pandemic.

An international team of physicists and engineers, including physicist Andrea Pocar at UMass Amherst, brought a simplified ventilator from concept to approval in just six weeks, from March 19 to May 1. It was conceived by physicist Cristian Galbiati of Princeton University and the Gran Sasso Science Institute in L’Aquila, Italy, who was in Italy when the pandemic hit that country.

Galbiati, Pocar’s long-time friend and fellow researcher on the DarkSide-20k project recalls, “the sense of crisis was palpable. It was clear that many patients would need respiratory assistance.”

Moved to help, Galbiati reached out to fellow researchers from the DarkSide-20k dark-matter experiment to develop a ventilator with minimal components that could be quickly produced using commonly available parts. Dark-matter researchers have extensive experience designing and using sophisticated gas-handling systems and complex control systems, the same capabilities required for mechanical ventilators.

Pocar noted that particle physicists “build our own stuff, one-of-a-kind instruments, and we have experience in developing unique electronics and software for our experiments.”

Soon engineers and physicists in nine countries, particularly in Italy, the U.S., and Canada, jumped in to help. Steve Brice, the head of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermilab Neutrino Division, noted that “there’s a huge benefit we’ve gained from the way particle-physics collaborations work. The structure already in place has large, international, multi-disciplinary groups. We can retask that structure to work on something different, and you can move much more quickly.”

The MVM is inspired by the Manley ventilator built in the 1960s. Its design is simple, cheap, compact, and requires only compressed oxygen or medical air and a source of electrical power. The team updated the electronics and control system. Stephen Pordes, a member of DarkSide stationed at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), noted that “we’re concentrating on the software and letting the hardware be as minimal as it can be.”

The team also worked with doctors, medical-device manufacturers, and regulators to make sure they were making something valuable and easy for medical staff to use, with a robust supply chain, and which could be quickly produced. Doctors tested the MVM prototypes on breathing simulators. Anesthesiologists from COVID-19 wards in a hard-hit region in Italy also offered detailed guidance on the design, the MVM team reported.

“MVM demonstrates that international cooperation that advances intellectual and technological innovation is possible not only in the academic arena, but also in areas where basic research impacts society and political decisions,” Pocar said, adding that the next step will be to facilitate the development of devices based on the open-source MVM in other countries, and to “try to facilitate as much as possible the seeding of entrepreneurship around this device. The intellectual property behind it would come for free for whoever wants to use it.”

AMHERST — Emergency federal financial-aid grants totaling $8.3 million were distributed to more than 7,700 undergraduate students this week by UMass Amherst, the latest in a number of steps the campus has taken to support students experiencing economic distress due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The funds were allocated through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Securities (CARES) Act. Grants were calculated based upon a number of factors, including financial need and an estimate of additional costs of food, housing, course materials, technology, healthcare, and childcare. To receive the grants, the law requires that students must be U.S. citizens or eligible non-citizens, according to guidance from the U.S. Department of Education. These are students who are eligible for federal aid under Title IV of the Higher Education Act. The grants provide additional financial aid to students and will not affect their existing financial-aid award.

Meanwhile, a $1 million pool of financial aid is being established for graduate students, a combination of CARES Act funds and university money.

UMass Amherst’s disbursement of CARES Act grants follows a series of previous measures taken to support students. These include issuing more than $40 million in room, meal, and parking refunds; $150,000 in COVID-19 hardship grants; support from the Student Care and Emergency Relief Fund; short-term emergency loans; approximately $300,000 to assist students returning from study abroad with airline-rebooking fees; and assistance offered by the Student Legal Services Office and the international Programs Office.

“We are appreciative of all the support provided by the Massachusetts congressional delegation, which pushed so hard for the inclusion of this funding that allows us to assist our neediest students in this time of crisis,” Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy said. “Of course, we realize that, for some, even with the combination of these resources, there will still be hardships. We encourage them to seek additional counsel from our Dean of Students Office. We will steadfastly work with the state and federal governments, and our generous donors, to continue to help all our students pursue their studies and complete their degrees without delay or hindrance.”

Added UMass President Marty Meehan, “these grants will help keep the aspiration of a college degree alive for thousands of UMass students who will go on to make a valuable contribution to society. I am grateful for the skilled advocacy that our congressional delegation demonstrated in securing these funds, and the outstanding leadership that Chancellor Subbaswamy and his team have shown in rapidly getting these critical funds to students.”

AMHERST — Researchers at the UMass Amherst Labor Center released a new report providing some of the first data on the safety and security of essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Clare Hammonds and Jasmine Kerrissey conducted an online survey of more than 1,600 essential workers in Western Mass. who were at work April 17-24. As of late April, Massachusetts had the third-highest COVID-19 case count among all states, and two cities in Western Mass. ranked among the cities with the highest death rates per 1,000 population in the country — Springfield (which ranked seventh) and Greenfield (11th), according to data compiled by the New York Times.

Hammonds and Kerrissey found that more than half of all essential workers surveyed, 51%, report that they do not feel safe at work. Among respondents, 65% say they are unable to practice social distancing, 29% did not receive COVID-19 transmission training, 21% lack masks, 17% lack hand sanitizer, 8% lack regular hand-washing opportunities, and 16% were asked by their employers to not share their health information with co-workers.

“Essential workers sustain our ability to live during this crisis, going to work to provide critical food, shelter, transportation, health, and safety, in a range of industries from healthcare and transportation to social services and public safety,” said Hammonds, professor of Practice in the UMass Amherst Labor Center. “Essential workers risk exposure to COVID-19 without proper safety precautions. The findings of this research provide important insight into how to protect the workforce as we begin to reopen the economy.”

The report, titled “A Survey of Essential Workers’ Safety and Security During COVID-19,” also found that:

• 67% of grocery and other retail workers report feeling unsafe at work, which is greater than healthcare workers (51%);

• Low-wage workers (less than $20 per hour) were two to three times more likely than high-wage workers (more than $40 per hour) to lack access to basic safety measures, including masks, hand sanitizer, regular hand washing, and training;

• Substantial numbers of low-wage workers report that they have been unable to meet their family’s food needs (34%), housing needs (9%), and childcare needs (16%) in the last week;

• 38% of Latino essential workers report food insecurity, compared to 21% of their white counterparts;

• About half of the survey’s respondents (52%) report their work has become more intense;

• Only 20% report receiving hazard pay; and

• 17% of essential workers lack paid sick leave, and roughly half say they are unable to use paid time off if a family member falls ill.

“Health and safety protections, hazard pay, greater enforcement of municipal ordinances, and protection of workers’ rights to self-organize are critical to improving worker safety,” said Kerrissey, assistant professor of Sociology in the Labor Center.

“I go to work six days a week,” one office cleaner told the researchers. “I go in after all employees have left to clean and disinfect the entire bank. I do six a night. When I am home, I do not leave my house for anything. I get all food/supplies delivered. What would improve my situation would be to not be working so I can stay home, as I’m quite afraid to leave my house now. But that’s not financially possible.”

When asked about what they need, a convenience store worker said, “the part that makes me feel unsafe is the customers. People are only supposed to come out for essential things, and that is not the case. People that are staying at home come in for a cup of coffee five times a day. Make it at home. People do not know the difference between what they want and what they need … About 50% of guests have no concept of six feet. They think because our backs are to each other, it’s fine … or, just quickly getting a coffee, it’s OK to be within six feet of each other.”

One hardware-store worker said, “going to a hardware store and buying bird food is not really essential, and it’s putting us at risk. Customers don’t seem to care about this virus that’s going around, making us workers not feeling safe.”

A low-wage retail worker added, “we are risking infecting our family by working, and they don’t give us anything extra in our paychecks to be able to buy more food. What we earn is for paying rent, electricity, insurance, and the rest is barely enough to buy food.”

SPRINGFIELD — UMass Amherst has donated 300 face shields to the skilled-nursing center at Loomis Lakeside at Reeds Landing. The face shields were developed by UMass researchers, engineers, nurses, and other health care professionals, and arrive at a time when personal protective equipment (PPE) is in very short supply for many nursing facilities in the region and throughout the country.

The design created by UMass enables the face shields to be mass-produced quickly by existing manufacturers. The first order placed by the Face Shield COVID-19 Response Team at UMass Amherst produced 80,000 face shields, manufactured by K+K Thermoforming, a company based in Southbridge.

“During challenging times such as these, we celebrate the spirit of collaboration and cooperation evidenced by the donation of needed face shields to Loomis by the University of Massachusetts,” said Marge Mantoni, CEO of the Loomis Communities. “The shields are being immediately employed in the Loomis Lakeside at Reeds Landing nursing center by our medical and related staff in serving our nursing-center residents. Many times over the past 12 years, the Loomis Communities has collaborated with the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and we welcome this generous gift of face shields as we work together in this time of crisis.”

UMass contributed more than $30,000 toward the initial production of face shields and hundreds of volunteer hours designing, testing, revising, and manufacturing the shields.

AMHERST — With the rapid onset of smell and taste loss emerging as symptoms of COVID-19, scientists around the world — including a sensory expert at UMass Amherst — have united to investigate the connection between the chemical senses and the novel coronavirus.

The wave of reports from patients and clinicians about anosmia, or smell loss, inspired the creation of the Global Consortium of Chemosensory Researchers. Alissa Nolden, UMass Amherst assistant professor of Food Science, is among the 500 clinicians, neurobiologists, data and cognitive scientists, sensory researchers, and technicians from 38 countries gathering data in a worldwide survey to unravel how the virus is transmitted and how to prevent its spread.

Nolden was invited by a colleague at the National Institutes of Health to help develop strategies around measuring the sensory-related symptoms of the coronavirus. “Smell and/or taste loss may be an early indicator of COVID-19, as individuals appear to report loss of smell or taste prior to other symptoms,” she said. “We also want to better understand the mechanism behind taste and smell loss as a result of this virus.”

She notes that the common cold, influenza, and other viral infections are known to cause changes in smell, which are thought to be related to blocked or stuffed-up nasal passages. “This prevents both smelling odors outside and inside the mouth, which can also result in reduced perception of food flavor,” she said. “But typically, you do not have a reduced sense of taste, meaning your perception of sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami remain the same.”

Another interesting characteristic of COVID-19, Nolden said, is that some patients also appear to have a reduced sense of chemesthesis, or chemical sensitivity. “This is unique, unlike the common cold. Some individuals have reduced oral burn from chili peppers or reduced or loss of cooling sensation from menthol.”

Nolden noted that some people with COVID-19 who experience sensory losses may not have any other coronavirus symptoms. The researchers hope to learn more about this from the survey, since people with sensory symptoms alone are not likely to qualify for a COVID-19 test.

“This has been a tremendous effort from collaborators from around the globe to gain a better understanding of the negative impact of COVID-19 on loss of taste and smell,” she said. “We hope to learn a lot about these symptoms and believe it will have a great impact on our understanding of the virus.”

AMHERST — Engineers from UMass Amherst responded to a request from Baystate Health in Springfield for help in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic by designing new, longer control cables for ventilators and the elimination of battery power sources. The design changes, developed by a team of electrical and computer engineers, allow medical personnel to control the ventilators at a distance and without using personal protection equipment, and they provide a more reliable source of power.

The UMass Amherst team includes Christopher Hollot, professor and department head at the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE); Baird Soules, a senior lecturer at ECE; and Shira Epstein, a lecturer at ECE. Other contributing members are ECE alumnus Tom Kopec; undergraduate Jeremy Paradie; Scott Glorioso, president of the Battery Eliminator Store and son of former UMass ECE Professor Robert Glorioso; and Chris Denney, chief technical officer at Worthington Assembly in South Deerfield.

Hollot said these two projects were a team effort. “This engineering response spanned the greater UMass family, including alumni, undergraduate, the makerspace community, local industry, and faculty.”

Baystate Health resident physician Dr. Mat Goebel initially contacted the Electrical and Computer Engineering department to fabricate a 25-foot control cable for hospital ventilators. The existing cable length is less than 10 feet. The engineers determined that longer cables did not exist and that the original shorter cables are extremely back-ordered. They also found that a key part of the design, the connectors, is proprietary.

They modified an old control cable from Baystate to analyze the signaling and determined that a longer cable was theoretically viable. The team then fabricated a 50-foot cable that was successfully tested on one of Baystate’s ventilators for empirical validation.

The team then tracked down the control cable manufacturer, Amphenol Sine Systems. At the request of the UMass Amherst researchers, the company agreed to design and fabricate these longer control cables. Baystate is now ordering the longer cables directly from the manufacturer.

Goebel and Kyle Walsh, respiratory specialist in Clinical Engineering at Baystate Health, also requested a design to allow portable ventilators to run on ordinary electrical power from a wall socket. The portable ventilators are designed to run on two D batteries with a lifespan of 48 hours. In a clinical setting, a wall-power solution removes the need for checking and replacing batteries every two days.

The UMass team solved the problem using a commercial off-the-shelf battery eliminator. They ordered a suitable battery eliminator and successfully tested it on a portable ventilator at Baystate. Subsequently, Baystate ordered 50 of these power supplies directly from the Battery Eliminator Store.

AMHERST — Answering an urgent call for assistance from regional healthcare systems, a volunteer team of scientists at UMass Amherst is preparing, testing, and delivering thousands of vials of viral transport media, a chemical solution needed for COVID-19 diagnostic testing. Their work is having a statewide impact.

Team leaders have recruited and trained several dozen volunteers, producing 13,000 vials for seven healthcare systems: Baystate Health, Berkshire Medical Center, Cooley Dickinson Health Care, Harrington Hospital, Heywood Hospital, Holyoke Medical Center, and the Northampton VA. In addition, Massachusetts’ COVID-19 Response Command Center has requested 10,000 tubes a week.

A critical shortage of the solution, which largely had been sourced from Northern Italy, has limited testing capabilities across the nation. Following guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the UMass Amherst scientists initially gathered ingredients from their own labs to produce the viral transport medium, which protects the patient’s testing sample from degradation.

“Viral transport medium is an isotonic mixture of salts and minerals, as well as serum proteins designed to stabilize the virus in the patient sample until testing can be done. It also includes antibiotics to inhibit yeast or bacterial growth, which can interfere with the test and destroy the patient’s sample,” said Michael Daley of the Cell Culture Core Facility at the Institute for Applied Life Sciences (IALS), which is spearheading a broad COVID-19 response effort at UMass Amherst.

“The creation of these virtual COVID-19 response teams has proven to be an effective way to rapidly address regional healthcare shortages, even in a time of social distancing,” noted Peter Reinhart, founding director of IALS, whose mission is to translate fundamental research into innovations that benefit humankind.

In a whirlwind of activity after Reinhart sought out UMass Amherst volunteers, a small group of scientists quickly produced some 600 vials of the viral transport media, painstakingly preparing exact proportions, quality-testing the solutions to ensure sterility, printing specialized labels, and affixing them to the vials before University Health Services clinical staff delivered them to two local hospitals.

“Within one week, we had verified and released our first batch,” Daley said. “A lot of credit goes out to everyone involved for us to have been able to pull this off.”

Added James Chambers, director of the Light Microscopy and Cell Culture Core Facilities at IALS, who is overseeing the labeling of the vials, “once the word got out to a few people that we were ramping up production this week, we were inundated with volunteers who want to do something to help with this fight.”

With an efficient process in place, including social-distancing setups in labs where volunteers wear gloves and face shields, the team is ready to speed creation of the viral transport medium. They now have the capacity to make 60 liters and fill 15,000 to 20,000 tubes each week, and are armed with enough supplies to create 120,000 tubes — each representing one COVID-19 diagnostic test.

“We are now at the stage where we are scaling up production and delivery to meet the needs of the frontline workers in our community and across the state,” Daley said.

A key team member is Barbara Osborne, distinguished professor of Veterinary and Animal Sciences, who helped get the project off the ground by providing ingredients from her own lab. She continues to volunteer her time to aliquot, or measure and dispense the medium from a large container into tiny vials, a highly quantitative task being carried out in IALS’ Cell Culture Lab. “This is all being done in one place, and that really is critical for the quality control,” Osborne noted.

She said additional UMass Amherst volunteers are ready to help if the sterile space and personal protective equipment are available. “There are tons of us who know how to make sterile media. I had to tell people to stop volunteering,” she said. “We could easily double the troops we have already enlisted.”

The life-sciences faculty and staff volunteers come from such departments as Biology, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Veterinary and Animal Sciences, Microbiology, and Psychological and Brain Sciences. Other volunteers include IALS administrators and staff, as well as some Ph.D. candidates and one undergraduate.

In addition to Daley, Chambers, and Osborne, team leaders are Rebecca Lawlor, Osborne’s longtime lab technician; Amy Burnside, director of Flow Cytometry and the Animal Imaging Core Facility at IALS, in charge of testing the batches for sterility; and Erin Poulin, lab manager at University Health Services, who handles the delivery of the vials to the hospitals.

AMHERST — Medical face masks, which have fallen into short supply during the COVID-19 pandemic, endangering both front-line healthcare workers and their patients, may be safely reused after sterilization, according to initial results from urgent research conducted this week by a UMass Amherst environmental health scientist.

Richard Peltier, a School of Public Health and Health Sciences professor, partnered with Dr. Brian Hollenbeck, chief of Infectious Disease at New England Baptist Hospital in Boston, to test in his lab whether used N95 face masks were still effective at blocking infectious particles after sterilization.

This critical research aimed to address the worldwide shortage of N95 masks caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. “As environmental health scientists, we are always looking for opportunities to improve public health,” Peltier says. “These results show that there is no real difference in filtration between a new mask and one that has been sterilized.”

N95 face masks are worn over the mouth and nose and capture particulates in the air. They are designed to be worn once and then discarded. When new, they are very effective at protecting a person from particulates, including droplets that carry infectious agents like COVID-19.

“While these are ordinarily disposable protective devices for medical workers, these are not ordinary times,” he said, “and this science shows that sterilized face masks will protect our healthcare providers who are working under extraordinary conditions.”

Peltier used state-of-the-art pollution instruments and a mannequin head wearing a face mask to measure whether microscopic particles can pass through the mask after it’s sterilized. He carried out the testing in a small chamber, in which he affixed the masks to a mannequin that had a small pipe extending from its mouth. The chamber was flooded with pollution, and air was collected through the mask as if the mannequin were breathing inside a room filled with pollutants.

The air was delivered to analyzers that used lasers to both count and estimate the size of millions of microscopic particles. Peltier switched between measuring the air from the chamber and the air from behind the mask to calculate how many particles passed through each mask type. He tested both a new mask, as well as one that had been sterilized with hydrogen peroxide.

While there was concern that sterilization might substantially degrade the filter material, causing it to function improperly, this turned out not to be the case. “They work just as well after sterilization,” he said.

Ordinarily, Peltier would repeat the test dozens of times, but the hospital in Boston could not spare additional masks, which, once tested, were unusable. “We are no longer under ordinary circumstances, and we have to improvise as best we can,” he noted.

Because the particulates blocked by the face mask are retained by the mask, they must be sterilized if not thrown away, he explained. “A used mask could have COVID-19 on it, so reusing it without sterilization poses a danger to the wearer or to another patient.”

AMHERST — A UMass Amherst biostatistician who directs the UMass-based Flu Forecasting Center of Excellence was invited by the White House Coronavirus Task Force to participate in today’s coronavirus modeling webinar.

The four-hour, virtual gathering includes 20 of the world’s leading infectious-disease and pandemic forecasting modelers, from researchers at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the U.S. to those based at institutions in England, Hong Kong, South Africa, and the Netherlands.

According to White House Coronavirus Task Force Coordinator Dr. Charles Vitek, “this webinar is designed to highlight for the task force what modeling can tell us regarding the potential effects of mitigation measures on the coronavirus outbreak. The unprecedented speed and impact of the COVID-19 epidemic requires the best-informed public-health decision making we can produce.”

Nicholas Reich, associate professor in the School of Public Health and Health Sciences at UMass Amherst, heads a flu-forecasting collaborative that has produced some of the world’s most accurate models in recent years. He and postdoctoral researcher Thomas McAndrew have been conducting weekly surveys of more than 20 infectious-disease-modeling researchers to assess their collective expert opinion on the trajectory of the COVID-19 outbreak in the U.S. The researchers and modeling experts design, build, and interpret models to explain and understand infectious-disease dynamics and the associated policy implications in human populations.

Reich is co-author of a new study in Annals of Internal Medicine that calculates that the median incubation period for COVID-19 is just over five days and that 97.5% of people who develop symptoms will do so within 11.5 days of infection. The incubation period refers to the time between exposure to the virus and the appearance of the first symptoms.

The study’s lead author is UMass Amherst biostatistics doctoral alumnus Stephen Lauer, a former member of the Reich Lab and current postdoctoral researcher at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. 

The researchers examined 181 confirmed cases with identifiable exposure and symptom-onset windows to estimate the incubation period of COVID-19. They conclude that “the current period of active monitoring recommended by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [14 days] is well supported by the evidence.”

Last fall, Reich received a grant of up to $3 million over the next five years from the CDC to operate the Flu Forecasting Center of Excellence at UMass Amherst, one of two in the nation the CDC has designated. The center’s mission is to identify new methods and data sources to sharpen the accuracy and improve communication of seasonal and pandemic flu forecasts.