Meet the CoreVent 2020, the little emergency ventilator that could

They never had to use the thing, and that’s a blessing.

But if things had gone just a 'touch' south, the CoreVent 2020 would have been ready – and some struggling patient, unlucky to contract COVID-19 but lucky enough to land at Stony Brook University Hospital, would have some innovative Stony Brook engineers and healthcare professionals to thank.

Right at the top: Mechanical Engineering Professor Jon Longtin, associate dean for research and entrepreneurship at Stony Brook’s College of Engineering and Applied Sciences (CEAS), who led the interdisciplinary SBU team – representing the CEAS, the Renaissance School of Medicine and the School of Health Technology and Management – that created the pressure-cycled CoreVent 2020.

Complete with assisted-breathing mode, visual status indicators, low- and high-pressure alarms and a menu-based computer interface, the fully functional emergency ventilator was designed, prototyped and tested – on an advanced lung simulator and laboratory mice – completely within Stony Brook University’s friendly confines.

That’s impressive under any conditions. But consider that the CoreVent 2020 came together at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, with Stony Brook Medicine facing a potentially disastrous ventilator shortfall, and the story takes a noble turn.

Now multiply that by the facts that the team a) did it in just 10 days, and b) essentially constructed the thing from spare parts, and the saga lurches toward the miraculous.

Miraculous, but true, though “spare parts” might be a stretch. Following an “aggressive timeline,” the intrepid innovators assembled the CoreVent 2020 exclusively from non-proprietary parts readily available from multiple vendors, a design strategy specifically intended to limit potential supply chain disruptions and facilitate rapid manufacturing, according to Dr. Longtin.

“If you go with a specific part from a specific manufacturer, and now they’re out or it takes eight weeks to deliver, that’s a problem,” he says. “The big concern was urgency – we might have needed a whole bunch of these things very quickly. Maybe hundreds.

“So this was a design philosophy from the beginning,” Dr. Longtin adds. “Any part we used, we wanted to make sure there were a number of different parts that would work, and that we could get them from as many different places as we could.

“This was about establishing the path of least resistance.”

The path led quickly to the successful CoreVent 2020, but only with expert contributions from across SBU’s innovation ecosystem – a “magical combination” of talent, ingenuity and circumstance, according to Dr. Longtin.

The “real hero” of the story, he says, is John Brittelli, a clinical professor in the School of Health Technology and Management’s Respiratory Care Program and a respiratory therapist by trade. As experienced with respirators as Dr. Longtin is with engineering, Brittelli proved to be “the kernel of everything,” according to the team leader.

“I didn’t know a thing about respirators or their physical or mechanical requirements,” Dr. Longtin notes. “I probably asked him a couple hundred questions during the course of this project. I got an entire semester’s education in 10 days.”

Rounding out the design team was Dimitris Assanis, who stepped into a true trial by fire: having just joined the CEAS faculty in January, the assistant professor of mechanical engineering quickly proved his mettle on the CoreVent 2020 project, and actually “took the lead in putting this thing together,” according to Dr. Longtin.

“He has incredible hands-on skills, and an innate talent for integrating a complex arrangement of components to play well together,” the associate dean adds. “He was an integral team member in every respect.”

Also integral, of course, was puzzling out the best combination of existing machinery and ancillary parts, all checking off those strict “readily available” boxes. That core principle almost went awry out of the gate, but for some quick thinking by Dr. Longtin.

“We needed to get a prototype working right away, and to do it, we needed some solenoid valves, some connectors and a controller,” he says. “I happened to have a current research project underway in the AERTC that had exactly the things I needed.”

The Advanced Energy Research & Technology Center, of course, was locked down along with the rest of the SBU campus – but researchers have been able to access their materials, allowing Dr. Longtin to “cannibalize” his advanced thermal-storage project, coming away with the solenoid valves and connecting hardware demanded by the CoreVent 2020.

“I raided my lab in the AERTC in the afternoon, and those same parts were working in an early prototype that evening in my garage,” he adds.

With the right talent on the job and the necessary hardware in hand, “we built a damn good ventilator,” according to Dr. Longtin. “There were a lot of ventilator concepts put forth as a result of the emergency situation, but most of them had fewer features and capabilities than ours.”

As good as the CoreVent 2020 turned out, the best possible destiny for the emergency ventilator ultimately came to pass. “We never had to use it,” Dr. Longtin notes, “thank goodness.”

The associate dean counts several factors that stopped the CoreVent 2020 from seeing field action. First, he says, social distancing did its job: “When we first started on this at the end of March, infections were rising exponentially … if we hadn’t turned the corner with the quarantines, we would have been in a crisis situation with the ventilators.”

Stony Brook University Hospital was also able to gradually increase its ventilator stockpile through donations and other means. But the final factor was the toughest to take: “Tragically,” Dr. Longtin notes, “if a person passes away while on a ventilator, it becomes free to use again.”

Not pressing the CoreVent 2020 into immediate service was A-OK with the team leader, who’s “never worked so hard for something I hoped would never be used.”

And while the impressive invention didn’t save any lives this time around, the 10 days of under-pressure design and prototype work will stay with him forever – and may still prove worthy in future life-or-death situations.

“It was an amazing experience – truly a team effort,” Dr. Longtin says. “And they talk about a second wave, so we don’t know if we’re out of the woods yet. We have a patient-ready working ventilator, so we’re on standby, in case this all ramps up again.”