CHICAGO (WBBM NEWSRADIO) -- The Food and Drug Administration has just approved a ventilator that was created by scientists from several countries – some of them right here in suburban Chicago.
It has taken a little over a month for a team of physicists and engineers to take a ventilator design from concept all the way to FDA approval.More than a dozen Fermilab volunteers worked on the Mechanical Ventilator Milano, or MVM. It was inspired by a device built in the 1960’s.
Dr. Steve Brice who was the lead on Fermilab’s involvement with MVM said the ventilator is the brainchild of his colleague, Cristiano Galbiati in Milan, which was hit hard by COVID-19.
"He has a large international collaboration that's doing particle physics research, but it uses kind of complex controls and control of gas flow - just the kind of thing that you need to put together a ventilator. And so, he reached out to a number of us to help pull this together," Brice said.
Physicists and engineers around the world worked on this project.
"We typically work in large, international, multi-disciplinary collaborations, so that organization can be retasked quite regularly to a project like this where we can work internationally, we can actually use timezones to our advantage, so we can literally work 24/7," Brice said.
The Mechanical Ventilator Milano works in two modes: Full ventilation of a patient and breathing support. The hardware and software designs will be made publicly accessible, and work is underway with medical device manufacturers on the first bulk production.
Fermilab said the hope is that it will close the gap between supply and demand on a short timescale.