 Hey folks, welcome to the podcast. So we're doing a special series of podcasts which I'm recording over Google Hangouts. So we're doing audio and video because for some unknown reason people don't want to come see me face to face right now. But there's always opportunity and the cool thing is I'm able to now podcast with people from all over the world. So we're going to get an amazing eclectic mix of people from different industries, different perspectives to share their story and tell us, you know, their thoughts and feelings on what's going on right now and all of that cool stuff. Hope you enjoy it. Please subscribe in all the usual places and enjoy. Awesome, I'm alive. Thanks for joining me on the podcast. And it's a pleasure to be joined by Dr. Sophie Cox, who is a lecturer in healthcare technology at the School of Chemical Engineering at Birmingham University, where I did my undergraduate. And Sophie, welcome to the podcast. Thanks very much for having me. Great to be talking to one of our alum as well. Yeah, yeah. I wasn't particularly good at chemistry, but I did get through just... Well, hopefully that's certainly no reflection on our chemistry school. No, no, it was my ability. The chemistry school pulled me up much higher to a much higher level than I would have been otherwise. So I love my time there. It was great. It's amazing. So COVID-19, I'm specifically protective equipment. What's the state of play at the moment? Yeah, so I work in our School of Chemical Engineering and our Healthcare Technologies Institute. And really what we aim to do is bridge the gap between academic research industry and clinical needs. So at the moment with the COVID crisis, there has been unique demands for personal protective equipment or PPE. And our kind of two main areas of focus are to improve the effectiveness of existing PPE, but also to rapidly manufacture equipment that is in short supply. So our team are really experts in a manufacturing process called 3D printing. So when you make an object layer by layer from a digital design, and what I think is really great to see within the 3D printing community is a lot of volunteers stepping forward to answer these calls for PPE from the NHS. Amazing. So many things to ask you there. Did we do that kind of wind back? Is there enough protective equipment right now in the NHS? So really it varies across the country and obviously things are changing day in, day out quite rapidly. And I think it's really testing our existing supply chains. So locally some hospitals have better supplies than others and sometimes they're well stocked and other times they're not. So really what we're trying to understand and other kind of members of the 3D printing community is where we can support that need and obviously speed is of the essence really here. Yeah definitely. So is it down to each local health authority to stockpile the correct equipment or is it more of a government level initiative? How have we got to the state where we're scrambling for equipment to protect the frontline health care workers? So obviously some decisions get made at more of a national government level and then there's local procurement that happens for particular hospital trusts. So they will manage their own procurement needs but then also obviously filter up that demand nationally to kind of feed into the government establishing the relationships that we need with the manufacturers that we need. But there's plenty of government initiatives to really bring the manufacturing community within the UK together to try and answer some of these challenges across PPE, ventilators etc. Yeah and you find the manufacturers to the local UK manufacturers that are getting together to try and produce the equipment? Yeah certainly there's definitely been a call to arms nationally across the UK especially within the 3D printing community. There's been kind of thousands of volunteers that have stepped forward people that just have a printer in their own home as well as you know several institutions like the University of Birmingham that are pooling together their resources and donating them or committing them to support the NHS. Amazing and for those that don't know can you give us a little overview of what 3D printing actually is and how from it you can produce a mask that someone can wear? Yeah so the 3D printing process kind of starts with the design so all of that design work gets done digitally so on a computer and what you produce is something called a CAD file so a computer aided design file that then needs to be converted into a file format that the printer can read and what all 3D printers have in in common is that they manufacture in this layer by layer fashion so what the printer needs to know is for each 2D slice what does it need to produce as a solid part so we convert our CAD files into something called an STL file so a stereolithography file and that's essentially just 2D slices of our three-dimensional parts. Our printer can then choose where to build each of those 2D slices and each 2D slices stacked one on top of the other until you've completed that kind of full three-dimensional part. Crazy, crazy. Yeah and that's only the basics. Yeah it's literally crazy so you can use different materials the whole way through. Yeah so I guess with 3D printing it's important to point out that we're not really talking about just one single manufacturing process here there are lots of different types of 3D printing and the one that I guess is the most common and is most kind of relevant to this discussion is something called fused deposition modelling and so this is a process that is capable of working with plastic materials so what you have in the 3D printer is a nozzle that's fed with a filament of plastic so just kind of like a coil of plastic that gets fed into the nozzle of the 3D printer that then gets heated up so that the plastic becomes a little bit liquefied and then it gets deposited as a kind of filament onto the bed of the 3D printer and repeated in a layer by layer fashion. Amazing, amazing. How long does it take to produce something like a mask? So we're printing our kind of two main projects are printing face shields so you know there's quite a few examples of these online and they have one of the components of that face shield is 3D printed which is the headband it fits around the user's head and that depending on which design you choose to print it takes a couple of hours. Right and then so the cool thing I guess with 3D printing is that unlike mass production same cost but personalised is that right? Yeah so that's definitely a very big advantage of 3D printing is the ability to customize the design and that really links into the other project that we've got going on related to COVID and so the kind of focus of that work is really around utilizing the customization advantage of 3D printing so what we're doing is 3D scanning people's faces so we can get an exact replica of their facial profile from that we are then able to design a customized seal that will perfectly fit that individual person's face and we're designing that seal such that it can fit onto any generic face mask that's already been used in the NHS so that gives us kind of two main advantages so firstly because it's customized it we hope it will provide a much better seal and therefore minimize exposure risks to the person wearing the mask but also secondly and this is kind of something that's really being brought to light as healthcare workers are using these masks more and more so they're having to wear them all day there's plenty of really dramatic pictures kicking around online now where healthcare workers are coming with quite significant bruising and so what we're aiming to do is actually print that customized interface to the mask in a flexible material to make the mask more comfortable and therefore to minimize any trauma or abrasion to the face of the healthcare worker so what's a what like a silicon type yeah exactly so printing in silicon creates a little bit of a you need slightly different 3D printer to be able to do that so silicon is a curing based polymer material so you have to mix the silicon itself with a curing agent so you need to have kind of two deposition nozzles that then get mixed together as you're printing in the process so that work is all in collaboration with some academics at Kings College in London that have really pushed forward this novel silicon printing technology nice so the two projects you've got going on so it's the the face masks and then it's the silicon attachment let's say yeah yeah fine and so at what point and what point did you in the team start to to really look at this was it like four weeks ago a few months ago like but when did the kind of covid like thing filter into you um so I think for us it really hit home probably um about a month ago and then we we sort of started working on both of these projects we've probably been working on them both for three weeks or so now so with the advisors what we looked at initially was to manufacture them in a in a distributed way so luckily numerous staff and students had actually taken 3D printers home with them when the university closed so we were able to kind of you know get a picture of all of that capacity that was across kind of the local area and connect up those people and really begin in a in a distributed way to make the rises and the silicon project actually came the initial idea came from our collaborator at King's College and so Professor Owen Addison he's a professor of dentistry but he holds a clinical appointment as well and so their research labs are actually based in a hospital building and therefore you know having that connectivity between engineers and clinicians that really helps us as engineers to you know understand what the problems are and how we might be able to use our skills to offer solutions yeah that's amazing and were you so did you just decide to start doing it or was there some government initiative to to start to get the universities and and teams like yours on the problem so we we started it just initially off our own backs really so leveraging capacity that we already had within our research teams and getting special permission from the universities to be able to access the equipment that we needed and so it was great that both universities were on board supporting us kind of rallying our our skills to achieve this and there have been some rapid response calls come out from the UK research and innovations the UKRI which we have just submitted to one of their calls to get some funding to to really drive the the customer still project forward and even more so nice and you're doing all of this while your team are working from home right sounds like yeah so the the the silicon project from our end has been done entirely from home unbelievable which is not usually the way we work but it's I think it's a great testament technology really that the fact that we've been able to stay connected talk to each other regularly throw ideas around you know share designs using sort of like a dropbox link so we can all be you know looking at different iterations and giving our input and stuff then a real eye opener to the way that you can work from home for sure yeah is it going to change the way you and your team work do you think going forward um I think so I think it will it will better connect us I think in the long term I think universities are very big places and we quite often have to use equipment within different buildings or different specialized institutes and therefore quite often the team are dispersed across campus and we might you know bump into each other once or twice a day but I think this has really taught us the strength that you can get through collaborating and making sure that you're regularly communicating with each other so I think it definitely will change things hopefully positively in the long term as well yeah and if you've been doing like daily video calls like this so zoom or google hangouts or whatever yeah so we've been using uh zoom Skype uh like the business you know all of the platforms have been um utilized um so yeah we try and keep in touch daily and um we use Slack a lot which was something we do already um we'd already used uh in the research group which we find really really useful for for sharing documents as well as ideas um and yes it's been fantastic to kind of be able to pull some of our undergraduate and phc students more um to the forefront of of uh this kind of cutting edge research really oh nice you've got them involved as well yeah absolutely as as the kind of concepts of sort of grown um particularly with the the silicon mask because there are various different types of masks that are being worn um in terms of their design how they fit to the face we've had to think about different ways of adapting our concept to each of those masks so some of them are much stiffer some of them fold flat some of them are now being 3d printed um so we've had to kind of split up the the different design concepts into different prototypes and therefore we've needed um some more hands on deck as such and so yes it's it's been fantastic you touched on it a little bit but um so in terms of actually getting it to the front line so it sounds quite fortunately you gave all of your team a 3d printer to take home when the lockdown happened which is great forward thinking so so they're so they're correct me if I'm wrong so they're in different parts of the country wherever home might be probably servicing their local hospitals and communities um I've always had the impression that it takes quite a while for something that's researched and and dreamt up in the lab to actually make it into industry and manufactured and and stuff so so what's what's been the process it's been starting three weeks ago for this project are we are we starting to see it worn by our healthcare workers yet um how can they get hold of it you know how how's that actually going to come into into distribution now yeah so I think the two projects we're working on are at quite different stages um so with the the visors that has been something we've been able to get out to distribution much quicker so there's been a lot of the 3d printing community online so manufacturers of 3d printers have been great at making their designs for these visors open source and that's really sped things up quite significantly and we're very lucky within our healthcare technologies institute that we have significant expertise around things like disinfection sterilization how to make medical devices that are suitable to go to clinic so we've been able to leverage some of that expertise that has really helped us not just answer the need but also make sure that we're doing it in a robust way so we've been able to have people manufacturing in their homes that then we do collections um from those localised places bring them into our collaborative teaching lab which is now set up on campus with a further 15 printers and we use that as kind of a central point where we're manufacturing there as well but we're also we've got kind of a quality management system set up there so we're doing quality checks we're then doing the disinfection centrally to making sure that they're all up to a good standard before then they can be distributed to the the trust of the local hospitals amazing how many are you able to produce a week now uh so the visors at the moment are maximum capacities about 100 a day 100 a day okay yeah um and all of those so far are going to um the university hospitals trust it in Birmingham so that covers the queen elizabeth hospital and the Birmingham women's and children's hospital okay so they're all going there at the moment and then like I said yeah and then for the kings they're attached to guys and st thomas is that right yeah so kings college is is attached to guys and st thomas is exactly um so that because what we're doing with the masks there was a little bit more um novel um it involves kind of several steps to the process so we're having to qualify the the 3d scan data that we're getting we're then having to do our own custom design work to design the the seal initially and now we're at a stage where we are prototyping the seals that we've made so far and looking at how well they fit onto the mask that they were designed to fit to um so that's kind of at a prototyping stage currently um and you know like I said we've we've just submitted for some funding um from uk r i so if that's um successful then we can certainly hope to be moving this forward to distribution um in the next few months really great and are they are they being quite quick now with funding uk r i yeah certainly the the turnaround time for reviewing of grants is um normally several months um but that but they've brought that down to um the 10 days or a week or so so that the calls are much more rapid than usual great and if anyone's listening that could fund your project are they able to do that yeah absolutely we do um the university's got a fantastic alumni team that manages um a lot of donations um for our research projects um I've been very lucky to to have funding from alumni in the past but we also accept charitable donations um for particular research projects as well cool well there's a lot of business leaders listening to this so if you are get on the phone and fund it because it sounds like a brilliant brilliant project how long will it take for the silicon then once funded to get out to the healthcare workers um so we're looking that project we've um currently designed as a nine month project and that would take us all the way through um to the point at which we could be scaling up the manufacture and have had regulatory approval on the sills um so a little bit longer than the the visors um but like I said it's it's um there's several stages to the process and obviously we want to be making sure that um it's it's a good quality and it's it's able to to do what it says basically definitely so do you envisage hopefully COVID will be finished by nine months or so but um are you seeing then there might be a bit of a step change in in in healthcare workers using protective equipment more now as a result yeah absolutely I think you know what we're doing with the silicon is much broader than just as a response to COVID it's about improving the efficiency of our PPE and obviously that will be critical to any um future crises as well um but it's also understanding how we can customize devices better and more rapidly because you can get so much more added value from from customized prosthetics or implantable devices so there's a lot of I guess basic scientific understanding that we're already beginning to to evolve as part of that work really so we're looking at that as kind of much more holistically um yeah great how effective are they the mask currently yeah um so they are pretty effective um what what they have to do with the um the highest specification mask so these are the FFP3s the the worker has to go through a fit test and as part of that fit test they do assess the seal of the mask and what we're really looking to improve there is to speed up the time that it takes for that fit test to be done but also it's about the comfort and reducing the trauma to the healthcare worker if they're having to wear the mask for such a prolonged period of time okay so it sounds like with a hundred hundred hundred produced a day we need to try and enlist as many other 3d printers as possible to really get every healthcare worker one of these things yeah absolutely um so yeah I think it's been great to see the response from the 3d printing community it's it really does highlight the value of having distributed manufacturing capacity because we can more rapidly respond to to local needs and I think a big thing moving forward will be how do we make our manufacturing capabilities more resilient um such that we can respond to these rapid healthcare demands yeah amazing well thank you so much for taking the time to educate us on this and keep up all the good work it's great to see our universities like pulling together in times of crisis perhaps the silver lining amongst all of this is the country pulling together a little bit and and working towards a common goal it's great yeah absolutely I think having a positive mindset on um what we can learn and how we can move forward as a as a country is is great I would just like to say give a big shout out to all of the research team behind both of these projects which has included several members of staff and several students all across the campus so they've been really working hard and coming together which is fantastic what we'll do once we start distributing the podcast online and we'll tag all the people that are part of it and so they get some recognition um awesome thank you keep up all the good work love you to speak to you thank you take care bye bye