Lab In Livermore Assists In National Swab Shortage

LIVERMORE, CA—A federal lab in Livermore is doing its part to help fight the coronavirus pandemic. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is working to minimize testing shortages by testing hundreds of 3D-printed nasal swabs for potential use.

According to the lab, one of the swab designs has received exemption status from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and is being made available to health care providers.

“We were looking at where we could contribute,” said LLNL engineer Angela Tooker, who led the swab testing effort. “We have expertise across the board in terms of design, materials, testing and manufacturing capabilities, but this needed to move so quickly that we looked at where the gaps were with the group we were working with. You could spend years working on this to find the most perfect design — we didn’t have that kind of time. It had to be good enough to get out the door now.”

As nasal swab usage ramped up significantly in March, Ramy Arnaout, a pathologist at Harvard University’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, put out a call to manufacturers for help. One of the largest suppliers of NP swabs, based in Italy, was forced to halt shipments to the U.S. With the hospital unable to obtain them from the other major swab manufacturer, an American company struggling to meet the uptick in demand, clinicians were running low on inventory. The LLNL team responded to to the call by offing any form of support to bolster the nation's testing swab supply.

“Our contribution was to develop mechanical test protocols and swiftly execute a battery of tests for quantitative measurement of the swabs’ mechanical response,” said LLNL engineer Eric Duoss, who helped guide the Lab team. “Working closely with our partners, LLNL helped accelerate the discovery cycle by providing results that directly informed redesigns, ultimately leading to performance improvements necessary to meet functional requirements.”

One of the 14 designs LLNL tested, Abiogenix’s FAST Spiral NP Swab, manufactured by FATHOM and printed with HP 3D-printing technology, went through 25 iterations. It was evaluated in a clinical trial conducted by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where it was identified as one of only four 3D-printed swab prototypes, out of 150 designs the clinicians reviewed, that could be used for COVID-19 testing. The swab received FDA exemption status and can be ordered by medical clinics and providers.

The team is currently finishing up the latest round of mechanical testing and awaiting feedback from companies and clinicians for potential tweaks to the designs, but the work doesn’t end there. The team recently received funding from the Department of Energy to further research new 3D-printed swab designs, determine their compatibility with polymerase chain reaction (PCR) DNA amplification techniques and is expanding work into developing 3D-printed prototypes for vials and other consumables used in nasal test kits, also in short supply.

To read more about LLNL's involvement with the swab designs, click here.