Nasal swabs, something many people had never heard of until COVID, suddenly became very hard to get just two weeks into the pandemic. Dr. Summer Decker and her team at the University of South Florida quickly determined they could make the swabs on a 3D printer. After making the printed swabs FDA compliant, Decker was able to share the design for free with the world. Since then more than 60 million such swabs have been used in global COVID testing. "One of our emergency room physicians told me," said Dr. Decker, "we are fighting a war and you gave us the bullets."

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01

Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to radio K to podcast from the Cade museum for creativity and invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We'll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we'll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

Richard Miles: 0:40

3D nasal swab, a phrase that doesn't roll off the tongue quickly and not the name of an indie band, but it has helped tremendously in COVID testing since the beginning of the pandemic. Welcome to Radio Cade. I'm your host Richard Miles. And today I'm pleased to welcome Dr. Summer Decker , Vice Chair for Research and Director, the 3D clinical applications at the University of South Florida's Morsani College of Medicine. Welcome to Radio Cade, Dr. Decker .

Dr. Summer Decker: 1:05

Thank you so much for having me I'm looking forward to this.

Richard Miles: 1:07

Well , the first thing I got to ask is what's up with Tampa. You guys are hitting it out of the park. Down there you're one yourself, and now you have world-class research institutions. There's something in the water. What is it about.

Dr. Summer Decker: 1:18

Beautiful Tampa Bay, we attract some top sports talent as you will have seen in the last few months here with our Lightening and the Buccaneers and even our soccer team and our baseball team. And , uh , yeah, it's been an exciting year for us here in Tampa, especially during COVID when things have been so tough, we all needed a little bit of cheer. So I think it's the Tampa Bay water.

Richard Miles: 1:38

I've got to say since we've started the Cade Museum project right away, USF University of South Florida came to our attention as just being this very innovative forward thinking research university that kind of started with humble origins, but man, you guys are doing pretty amazing things now.

Dr. Summer Decker: 1:52

Well, I appreciate that. I was lucky enough actually, to do my doctorate here. And one of the things they really do train us on here at the medical school is to think differently about solutions to problems that maybe have been occurring for some time. And so I like to say we're young and scrappy because we realized we're up and coming university or up and coming medical school. And so we have that liberty of not having to been, Oh, this is the way we've always done it. That we can actually look at things differently and use technology in different ways. And so that's really what we train. And even as a student here as , okay, you have the way it's always been done, but how would you do it differently? And it lends that intellectual freedom if you will. So that's actually what attracted me here to come to USF. I had heard that too, and I'm proud to been able to stay here and hopefu