And when you have lots of smaller manufacturers distributed near where the product is required, you end up with a provide chain that's a little bit safer, just because you have more producers which might be in more locations. So Origin like we talked about earlier, they're making swabs at their manufacturing facility.

And this can be a single 3D printed kind that that accomplishes all of that. So, once more, these usually are not simply 3D printed versions of precisely what was made conventionally needed to be redesigned for 3D printing to perform the identical wanted functionality. A inflexible handle, but then much less rigidity within the compliant a part of the swab, that wants to enter the affected person.

Another case, Carbon sort of put all their support behind Resolution Medical, which is a key customer of theirs. Resolution actually designed the Carbon swab and they are processing the swabs that the entire other Carbon users are making along with the ones that they are making themselves. In the case of HP, it sounds like a few key service bureaus like Fathom and Forecast 3D are going to be the ones truly making the swabs. The the traditional swab is a molded portion with a with a cloth flocking at the finish.

There's plenty of builders which are kind of doing a mixture where they're making some of their own. Formlabs is an instance, they've a facility right here in Ohio with 200 printers the place they're printing swabs, however they're also utilizing their customers to make these swabs as well.

A head that collects the sample, there's this 3D printed lattice kind that takes the place of what the flocking accomplished and serves precisely the identical function. So the rapid design growth of this product, that's what it was all about.

Globally, the testing equipment availability has been vastly inadequate for the large-scale testing wanted so as to establish and isolate recognized circumstances of the virus and get ahead of its unfold within every community each within the United States and throughout the globe. The traditional manufacturing methodology for the swabs is tedious and limited, with the final testing swab needing to exhibit distinctive properties of softness and suppleness which are difficult to provide.

EnvisionTEC worked with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center to develop a swab design and materials to be printed on their best-selling Envision One cDLM 3D printer. So sort of all through this pandemic situation, we have seen these cases the place the availability chain breaks down for one reason or another. And typically it's as a result of there's only one or two major producers of some crucial merchandise. And what 3D printing is getting us to isn't just a unique means of creating these products, a special design in some circumstances for these merchandise, but it's really just a different means of doing manufacturing.

It was about tweaking it, redesigning it, getting this kind excellent so that it operates simply as well as the traditional swabs do. Most of these swab designs have gone through that validation as this one has on the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.