Sandia Labs honored for fighting Ebola
Scientists analyzed transport system, disease transmission in Liberia
The work of Sandia National Laboratories at the intersection of biology and national security, including lifesaving efforts during the 2014 Ebola epidemic, has been recognized by the Department of Energy.
Last month, Dmitri Kusnezov, chief scientist and senior adviser to the secretary of energy, visited Sandia to honor nearly 60 Sandians for their work to mitigate the effects of the Ebola epidemic and the efforts of the Technology Convergence Working Group.
DOE established the working group in 2015 to provide technical insight and assess the nation’s emerging biological technologies. The group is comprised of representatives from DOE headquarters and Sandia, Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos national laboratories, including Jim Carney and Duane Lindner of Sandia.
Reducing the amount of time Liberians who suspected they had Ebola spent in large, open waiting rooms, called Ebola treatment units, was critical to controlling the outbreak. Sandia modeled and analyzed the West Africa nation’s blood-sample transport system from the treatment units to diagnostic labs and made recommendations to improve turnaround time.
Sandia’s solution minimized the amount of time that people were together in these open units, so somebody with a less serious illness wasn’t infected by an Ebola victim, said Sandia infectious disease epidemiologist Monear Makvandi, who traveled to Liberia in 2014 to gather information for the models and was recognized during the ceremony.
Sandia also was involved in modeling the potential need for quarantine, the effects of various changes to the global air transportation network, even the resilience of the U.S. hospital system to Ebola cases. In addition, Sandia continues scientific research to understand how Ebola was transmitted in West African clinics.
“It is a great honor for Sandia’s wide-ranging biological work to be recognized by the secretary of energy. I personally appreciate this recognition of our contributions to the nation,” said Lindner, director for the Homeland Security program.
For the initial Liberia project, Sandia developed performance requirements for a new nationwide sample-delivery system. The Liberian Ministry of Health and a nonprofit organization that transported samples by motorcycle adopted the requirements, said Jen Gaudioso, senior manager of Sandia’s International Biological and Chemical Threat Reduction.
The Defense Threat Reduction Agency and U.S. Command Center for Combating Weapons of Mass Destruction sponsored the project.
Sandia’s work was important to help control the epidemic because patients received care faster. The sooner public health professionals identified Ebola carriers, the sooner they located people outside the clinic who had contact with a carrier and might have been infected, said Pat Finley, who led Sandia’s modeling effort.
Operations research analyst Jared Gearhart and his team developed algorithms to determine the optimal locations for labs and the best transportation routes, while accounting for such obstacles as a national curfew, poor infrastructure and lack of lab capacity.
Finley and his team created a computer model of Ebola treatment in Liberia.
Leo Bynum, the geospatial analytics lead, and his team collected data and transformed it into maps, a task made more difficult by incomplete, anecdotal and, at times, incorrect data.
Gaudioso and Makvandi travelled to Liberia in November 2014 to interview health care workers in the field, international agencies working in the country and Ministry of Health representatives to get the latest data for Sandia’s model.
In Liberia, Sandia’s contingent reached back to the rest of the team in New Mexico to provide updated analyses, Gaudioso said.
While the travelers slept, their colleagues at Sandia answered the questions and incorporated changes into the model before work started in Liberia the next day.
With so many organizations involved in the response, it’s difficult to say how Sandia’s sample transport system affected wait times, but the team had anecdotal evidence that the project reduced the travel time from two days to a same-day or overnight diagnosis, Gaudioso said.
Though the World Health Organization declared the most recent epidemic over in 2016, Gaudioso said Ebola and other diseases could always re-emerge.
“The epidemic brought a lot of aid and attention to the public health systems in West Africa. Sandia hopes to help build on that momentum to provide a sustainable and resilient health infrastructure that is ready for future infectious disease outbreaks,” she said.