“Get me a million as fast as you can.”
Dean Kamen was talking to some of his employees in China who had found a manufacturer there that could make medical masks, gowns and other supplies.
Then he called his friend, Fred Smith, founder and CEO of FedEx: “Fred, I need these packages delivered really fast.”
This pallet of medical items is expected to arrive in Manchester from China on Sunday. Dean Kamen’plans to distribute them to Elliot Hospital and Catholic Medical Center in Manchester and to the state to help New Hampshire medical providers.
Sometime today, a FedEx truck is expected to deliver a pallet of precious medical items to DEKA Research and Development, Kamen’s company in the Manchester Millyard, will distribute them to Elliot Hospital and Catholic Medical Center in Manchester and to the state to help New Hampshire medical providers cope with the coronavirus crisis.
It won’t be the last shipment. “I’m opening up a supply chain that I think will be very reliable,” Kamen said Saturday.
The Bedford inventor/entrepreneur is difficult to keep up with even in normal times. In response to this crisis, he and his teams at DEKA have been spinning in a dozen different directions, doing what they can to help the state and nation.
It’s quite a lot.
Kamen has been talking with federal Department of Health and Human Services officials about using one of his inventions, a water purifier called the Slingshot, to deliver sterile water critical for making IV solution, which could soon be in short supply.
“If we can make significant quantities of sterile solution in distributed locations around the country and around the world, it can help with another shortage that could become more critical than the masks shortage,” he said. “We are doubling down right now on figuring out how to make that machine capable of delivering sterile water and IV solution as quickly as possible.”
Named after the tool the biblical David used to deal with Goliath, DEKA’s “Slingshot” uses vapor compression distillation to purify water. Now federal health officials hope the device can help make sterile water for use in IV solutions during the coronavirus crisis.
DEKA engineers also are sharing with federal health officials a promising new material for medical masks that doesn’t just block the virus. “We shipped samples of it to a lab that’s testing our material against live virus to see if it kills it,” Kamen said. “If it does, we’re trying to figure out how we can ramp up high volumes very quickly. We’re optimistic, but we don’t have any data yet.”
Other projects his engineers have been working on for some time have taken on new urgency in this health crisis, Kamen said. “Almost every project DEKA does happens to be intersecting with the most vulnerable populations,” he said. “If you look at the clinical situation and look at who’s most affected, you start with people with respiratory and pulmonary problems.”
DEKA recently received FDA approval for a new wearable drug-delivery system for patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension. “We’re starting production, and of course that population now needs these things more than ever,” Kamen said.
“So while everybody else is shutting down, my team at DEKA ... is redoubling their efforts,” he said. “We’ve got to get those things out to people who need them.”
Another project is a clinical trial that allows individuals to undergo dialysis at home. “We’re trying to get it through as quickly as we can to make it possible for dialysis patients to treat themselves in the privacy — and frankly, the safety — of their homes,” Kamen said.
One of Kamen’s first inventions was the insulin pump, used by diabetics.
Dean Kamen, founder of FIRST Robotics, runs on the field during the unveiling of the new challenge, “Infinite Recharge,” in January at Southern New Hampshire University in Manchester. This year’s competition has been canceled because of the pandemic, but FIRST teams have been using their skills to build ventilators.
Doing more faster
For decades, the project closest to Kamen’s heart has been FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), an educational program that uses competitive robotics to encourage young people to explore careers in STEM fields. For the first time since Kamen launched the program in 1989, the FIRST Robotics Competition has been canceled because of the global pandemic.
But the FIRST kids aren’t sitting around moping. “FIRST is off doing all kinds of great things, and I’d expect nothing less from them,” Kamen said.
On Saturday, Kamen got an email about a team in Michigan. “They took apart their robot kit from last year’s competition and built a ventilator out of it,” he said.
There’s also a FIRST group in Israel that designed and built a small ventilator, Kamen said. They brought their machine to the Israeli equivalent of the FDA and a military hospital, and they have since built 500 of them, Kamen said.
The students are in the process of putting their plans into an open-source file for FIRST teams around the world. “If every one of the teams makes a couple ventilators, it will substantially increase the total number of ventilators available,” he said.
FIRST things first
The FIRST model is exactly what’s needed to deal with the current crisis, Kamen said.
“The whole FIRST community is used to getting an impossible problem statement, an incredibly short amount of time to deliver a working solution, and to do it in a way that while their robots are competing, the community is working together and sharing.”
Challenges like this bring out the best and the worst in people, Kamen said. He is angered by those who are hoarding, price-gouging or “using fear as a weapon.”
“It’s discouraging for me to see that at a time like this, there are some people that are trying to inappropriately benefit from what’s going on. I’m just proud that everybody at DEKA seems to be totally focused on: How can we do more, do it more quickly, and help people?
“They know how much the world, and certainly the state and the country, are depending on us.”
Kamen hopes the crisis will remind people of what’s really important “and that we should be investing in long-term solutions.”
As a child, when he read the story of the three little pigs, Kamen said, “I always wanted to be the one that built the brick house.”
Now, he said, “I have a whole Millyard full of brick buildings.
“I’ve just always believed you’re better off preparing for the future than trying to react in a crisis.”
