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SALT LAKE CITY — Scientists around the globe are trying to answer critical questions about how effectively the novel coronavirus spreads through the air or gets picked up from a surface, and a biomedical engineer at the University of Utah is using a special cabinet to look for those answers.
Dr. Jessica Kramer, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the U., wants to find out how effectively different forms of mucus spread the virus.
“(Mucus) covers basically every wet surface in the human body,” she said.
Mucus hydrates our tissues and keeps them wet, Kramer said. That combination of water, proteins and sugars is essential to life, and the transmission of the coronavirus.
“When we cough or sneeze, we spray out tiny mucus droplets and the virus is trapped, or encased, inside these mucus droplets,” she said.
But we don’t all have the same mucus — there are hundreds of different forms.
“We want to know if different forms of the mucus either speed or slow the transmission of the virus,” said Kramer.
To test that out, she and her eight-person team are creating eight different synthetic forms of mucus in their biomedical engineering lab.
“We are making, one-by-one, the forms we think are important in binding to the virus,” she said.
They will mix the different types of synthetic mucus with a safe surrogate of the coronavirus and aerosolize them inside an airtight biosafety cabinet. An aerosol device sprays the mucus into the stainless steel cabinet, which is sterilized between each use. A powerful UV light kills any virus the disinfectants miss.
An environmental health and safety team at the university has to sign off on all of their procedures, which were designed to reduce the number of people in the room and improve social distancing.
“Everyone in the lab is working in shifts,” Kramer said.
Related:
U. researchers studying role of mucus in COVID-19 spread
Every time a person infected with COVID-19 coughs or sneezes, they spray out potentially lethal droplets of the virus.They are trying to answer important questions we all have about the transmission of the virus.
“Do we need to wash our groceries? Should we touch our mail? How dangerous is the doorknob?” Kramer asked.
They will also coat human cells with synthetic mucus to see how well the virus penetrates mucus and enter cells.
“It’s a really exciting time for science. People find opportunity in crisis,” Kramer said. “We’re all trying to use our skills to help in the way that we can.”
The project is slated for one year, but researchers hoped to have some results on how well the virus survives on surfaces in the next few months.
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