Researchers at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University, in collaboration with healthcare, research, and industrial partners, have designed a new, fully injection-molded nasopharyngeal swab that can be manufactured quickly and inexpensively at high volume to help address the nationwide and international shortage of swabs for COVID-19 testing and research. The swabs are moving into human trials at SUNY Downstate Medical Center and Translational Genomics arch Institute (TGen), an affiliate of City of Hope, which should be completed by the end of next week, and are in preclinical evaluation at six additional hospitals. Data from the two trials will be used to inform larger trials with COVID-19 patients, and California-based medical device manufacturer IPB, Inc. has been working around the clock to ramp up production of the new swabs to reach 200,000 per day by May 15.
"Experts have recently estimated that the United States needs to more than triple the number of daily COVID-19 tests in order for the country to be safely reopened by mid-May, but the current swabs are complicated to make, and producers just don't have the ability to increase production to that level in such a short period of time," said Richard Novak, Ph.D., a Senior Staff Engineer at the Wyss Institute who has been leading the multi-institutional effort to develop a fully injection-molded swab, working with the Wyss Institute's Founding Director Donald Ingber, M.D., Ph.D. "These new swabs can help meet the critical need for collecting samples, both to diagnose patients and to study the virus itself so that treatments and a vaccine can be found sooner."
The project began just over a month ago when clinician-researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) reached out to Ingber asking for help to solve the hospital's swab shortage as the COVID-19 pandemic was blossoming. Ingber, Novak, and a team of Wyss researchers joined the multi-disciplinary effort, quickly realizing that not only could they design a swab replacement, the Wyss Institute's unique position at the intersection of academia and industry meant that it could bring together clinicians who needed swabs, researchers who were developing them, and manufacturers who could rapidly produce them at low cost, streamlining the process to get the swabs into the hands of doctors and nurses as quickly as possible.
The nasopharyngeal swabs that have been used in hospitals for more than 50 years consist of two pieces: an injection-molded plastic handle and an absorptive tip made of a soft material such as cotton, polyester, or flocked nylon. Each swab is manufactured in a multi-step process, then assembled, sterilized, and packaged, all of which requires significant time and expense. As part of the overall effort to create a more streamlined alternative, other teams have leveraged 3D printing to meet this challenge, which has led to some useful short-term solutions. However, 3D printing is currently costly and can only be done at scale by a limited number of suppliers. The Wyss team set out to create a new design that could be manufactured using injection molding rather than 3D printing, because injection molding is faster, less expensive, and is routinely used by a broad range of experienced medical device manufacturers worldwide.
In mid-March, Ramy Arnaout, M.D., Ph.D. and James Kirby, M.D., who lead the Clinical Microbiology Laboratory at the BIDMC, began collaborating with the Wyss team, who developed and tested new swab designs that they 3D printed and showed each other via video calls and email, as social distancing measures prevented them from physically working in the same space. Over repeated trials, they eventually settled on a design with a flexible, honey-dipper-like tip that could be injection-molded. The Wyss team has now sent prototype injection-molded swabs produced by Proto Labs to eight hospitals and health centers for preclinical testing, in which clinicians are evaluating the swabs' performance on a variety of fronts including their comfort and ease of use, as well as their ability to collect a large enough sample with detectable amounts of viral RNA.
The swabs are being tested in human subjects who will receive a normal swab in one nostril and a prototype of the Wyss-designed swab in the other. If the new swabs can collect a sample that contains detectable genetic information while being as easy-to-use an...
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