FDA Approves New Ventilator Developed by NASA for Coronavirus Patients

The Food and Drug Administration has approved a new high-pressure fan designed by engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the space agency announced Thursday. The fan, developed by JPL in just 37 days, made headlines last week when it passed a critical test at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. NASA then sought and obtained accelerated FDA approval for the device through an emergency use authorization, an accelerated approval process developed for crisis situations.

The next step is to find manufacturers within the commercial medical industry.

“Now that we have a design, we are working to pass the baton to the medical community and ultimately to patients as quickly as possible,” said Fred Farina, director of innovation and corporate partnerships at Caltech, which manages JPL for The NASA. “To that end, we are offering royalty-free licensing designs during the time of the pandemic.”

Although JPL normally builds spacecraft, not medical devices, the engineers intervened due to the nation’s limited supply of traditional ventilators, which are required for COVID-19 patients experiencing severe respiratory distress.

The fan has been named VITAL, for locally accessible ventilation intervention technology, and can be built faster, easier, and with fewer parts than a traditional fan, according to NASA.

“We have the potential to save human lives, people we might know, our neighbors, our families,” said Michelle Easter, a mechatronics engineer on the project. “And that intensity … it’s amazing, it’s amazing.”

Playing now:
See this:

The new fan prepares us for a second or third wave …

3:54

Updated April 30 at 4:30 p.m. PT: Added news that the FDA has approved a ventilator for emergency use