COVID- 19
“They were going on to Good Morning Britain on the Monday morning at 8am, which left us with less than two days to build a website and an approachable brand that people felt they could trust,” Ray explains. The resulting site – helpthemhelpus.co.uk – now provides secure end-to-end digital infrastructure to allow NHS workers to apply for and receive financial relief grants digitally. Staff can now submit an application through the HEROES website, while the site also allows members of the public to make donations to the charity, and provides information on a wide range of topics relevant to NHS staff. Crucially, it was also ready for Cole’s date on the Good Morning Britain sofa. The project was one of 19 schemes across the country to receive a special engineering award from the Royal Academy of Engineering for its ‘transformative’ effect on people’s lives. “The award was a real honour and a surprise,” Rays says. “There must be so many engineers out there who played an important part in the pandemic and we were just the ones lucky enough be recognised.” FIVE YEARS’ WORK IN FOUR WEEKS Ray and his friends were not the only ones leaping into action as Covid-19 took hold. Teams around the city raced to come up with new ventilator designs as fears rose that hospitals could be overwhelmed. TTP just outside Cambridge was one of the companies that answered the call of the government’s Ventilator Challenge, developing from scratch a machine built with existing parts that could be manufactured rapidly. Within four weeks they had a working product ready to submit to the Medical and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) for approval. Diagnostic testing is critical to track the virus, understand epidemiology and suppress transmission"
on this project,” he says. “With CoVent, we moved through the phases of the project quickly. Because we have a flat organisational structure, people were used to working in a fluid, rapidly changing environment. “The other thing is around radical trust. When you’re trying to move that fast, you don’t have time to tell everybody everything; you have to keep the information flowing and pass on the minimum necessary to get the job done. That requires extreme trust that things that you know need to happen were happening, and that proved to be the case.” SCIENCE TO THE FORE IN TESTING TIMES As the pandemic has developed, the focus has moved on to testing and, ultimately, developing a vaccine that could help life get back to some sort of normality. Cambridge- based AstraZeneca has been at the heart of developing one of the most high-profile vaccine candidates, working with experts from the University of Oxford. Though there have been a few bumps in the road recently, with trials suspended at the time of writing, CEO Pascal Soriot is still hopeful they will have something ready to submit to the regulators in the next few months, stating recently that AZ is “on track for having a set of data that we would submit before the end of the year”. Elsewhere in the Cambridge life science Cluster, Avacta has been working on three separate testing projects deploying the company’s Affimer platform, which is designed to offer an alternative to conventional antibody therapies.
“Responding to challenging problems is what we do all the time,” says Douglas Bradshaw, who heads up the company’s healthcare activities. “And the government’s not the first client to phone us up and say, “We’ve got a ‘burning tower’, can you help?” The objective was to create a design for a ventilator that could be manufactured in thousands of units per week. Within three days we had a initial design and within ten days that design was more or less fixed. “Normally for a project like this you would use bespoke parts, because that gives you more options. But here there was zero chance of doing that because of the timescales involved, so we had to use simple valves and sensors that were available in their thousands. We had to work closely with the government to ensure supplies were available and we have ended up with a product that can be built from components and raw materials that are available in vast numbers, and we managed to source all the components bar one from UK suppliers.” Given that this process usually takes three to five years, to turn something around in a matter of weeks is a testament to the skills in TTP’s team. The design is now ready to go into rapid production should the pandemic escalate again and put more pressure on clinics. Douglas says the lessons learned during the project can be taken forward into TTP’s work designing cutting-edge products for clients around the world. “I think it showed me that the way our team works really helped
BELOW TTP’s Douglas Bradshaw,
who heads up the company’s healthcare activities
ISSUE 07 10
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