Shortly after the COVID-19 blockades began to take effect almost exactly one year ago, a wave of new engineering methods for decomposing the virus was proposed, including robots and drones with ultraviolet light emission.
Now, researchers are moving to another approach with the same prefix: an MIT study shows that ultrasound waves at medical imaging frequencies can cause the virus shell and tips to collapse and break in advanced simulations.
Spikes, the component of the virus that attaches to healthy cells, could be vulnerable to ultrasonic vibrations within the frequency used in medical diagnostic imaging, MIT researchers explain in a press release.
In their simulations, researchers at MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering modeled the virus’s mechanical response to vibrations flow through its structure over a range of ultrasound frequencies.
They found that vibrations between 25 and 100 megahertz triggered the shell of the virus and the tips to collapse and begin to break in a split second. The simulations showed that the virus will break into air and water at the same frequencies.
Potential new ultrasound treatment for COVID-19
Although MIT researchers point out that their findings are only preliminary and based on limited data, they say the research indicates that an ultrasound-based treatment could be developed to combat COVID-19.
“We have shown that under ultrasound excitation, the shell and tips of the coronavirus will vibrate, and the amplitude of that vibration will be very high, producing strains that could rupture certain parts of the virus, visibly affecting the outer shell and possibly invisible. damage to RNA inside, “said Tomasz Wierzbicki, a professor of applied mechanics at MIT.” The hope is that our work will initiate a discussion between various disciplines. “
For their simulations, the MIT team used simple concepts about the mechanics and physics of solids to build their model for calculating the structure of the virus. Limited data, such as microscopic images of the shell and the tips of the virus, were used to inform the model.
Although the exact material properties of the virus peak are unknown, the researchers believe that their simulation paves the way for further research on a new treatment for COVID-19.
“We looked at the general coronavirus family and now we look specifically at the morphology and geometry of Covid-19,” Wierzbicki said. “The potential is something that could be extraordinary in the current critical situation.”
Such treatment could help people who have not or cannot get the vaccine. It could also provide an alternative and safety against failure if new mutations in the virus are unlikely to bypass the immunity afforded by multiple COVID-19 strokes.