OpenCOVID-19: Fighting the virus through open source

Thomas, could you explain the OpenCOVID-19 initiative?

The OpenCOVID-19 Initiative seeks to bring together individuals and groups from a variety of backgrounds and fields to create the solutions we need to address the Covid-19 pandemic and develop a comprehensive and open collection of these solutions and research. We have divided our efforts into three main challenges:

• Prevention: preventing the spread of Covid-19 and decreasing the scale of the pandemic;
• Detection & Diagnosis: detecting the presence of SARS-CoV-2 in patients and in the environment;
• Treatment & Therapeutics: developing solutions to treat the symptoms of Covid-19.

How is collaboration organized?

We created a collaborative scientific platform called Just One Giant Lab (JOGL). This platform is at the core of the program: anyone can join and create a profile and a project. And because we know the skills of the community members and the needs of the projects, the JOGL platform matches them and enables anyone to find a project to contribute to. To date, more than 4,000 contributors from all continents have joined JOGL. They are working on low-cost, open source solutions such as FFP2 masks, ventilators, diagnostic tests and mobile applications that help users adopt good habits. The projects and contributors are sorted by relevance and the most relevant receive more visibility. Basically, it is a very large research center composed of volunteering professionals and students in both research and administration positions. This is what JOGL enables.

The initiative has different advisory groups, composed of volunteer experts, who provide clear answers to the projects’ questions and needs. So far, we have a biosafety and biosecurity board and working groups for software, data science, hardware and design. We also have groups made up of JOGL team members and we have 40 volunteers who contribute to the operational aspect of the program. They manage the coordination of the various challenges and handle the onboarding of new participants.

Why is it important to have contributors from different backgrounds and fields?

The Covid-19 crisis doesn’t care about disciplines, it is urging us to react in fields as different as resuscitation, large scale diagnosis, fake news propagation and contamination prevention. In order to have a global response, we need to not only understand the problem, experiment and prototype solutions, but also manufacture and distribute validated methods and tools, manage large group of collaborators and partners, while maintaining a high-level of transparency. It becomes clear that scientists, engineers, coders, healthcare professionals, industrial designers, project managers, community managers and more need to collaborate in order to achieve our objectives. To date, our participants are currently equally represented between engineers, entrepreneurs, and designers, marketing and communications specialists.

What are the most impactful projects underway and when can we expect a prototype and or potential scale up?

The first step of the OpenCOVID-19 initiative is to identify or create the right protocols and blueprints. This step needs a lot of prototyping in local laboratories (medical facilities, fablabs, workshops, R&D labs, community labs, etc.) before we converge toward common accessible solutions we can produce and scale. These prototyping and R&D steps are critically relying on the collective intelligence that JOGL enables. But local laboratories will need to pay for materials and consumables. We are supporting local labs with access to expertise and guidance (such as with our biosafety and biosecurity board) and resources through our partners such as the AXA Research Fund.

The first output of the OpenCOVID-19 initiative is going to be the validation of the best open source and low-cost designs for protective gear such as FFP2 masks or face shield. Our role is to provide manufacturers with clear guidelines to distinguish a truly good design from a bad one. To date, three models of masks are being tested at the Assistance Publique - Hôpitaux de Paris (AP-HP).

In partnership with the AP-HP, we have identified their needs in order to develop adapted solutions and have them tested in a hospital environment. Once validated by AP-HP, the plans are shared worldwide. One of the projects resulting from this partnership is an electric syringe pump, stocks of which are running low and allow to inject treatment into patients. The pump prototype could be tested within ten days. The final object will cost thirty times less than a current syringe pump and can be manufacturable anywhere in the world.

In our first round of project funding, we selected seven projects. The second round is now open and we are expecting excellent projects, once again.

We have high expectations on the development of low-cost diagnosis tools for Covid-19 that will be useful for both patients testing and environmental monitoring (tracking where the virus is in cities). We are also confident in the development of apps that will help track how the virus moves and let people know if they have been potentially infected or not. And finally, the development of parts for low-cost ventilators that can be deployed easily.

One thing is certain, as this initiative responds to the need for speed in the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic, what will be produced is also open knowledge and technology that will become a basis for fighting any other epidemic in the foreseeable future.