Johns Hopkins APL Projects Among Fast Company’s ‘World Changing Ideas’

The ability to sequence the genome of SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing COVID-19, has been integral in tracking COVID’s variants around the globe. But advanced genomics work has historically been the province of highly specialized laboratories with access to top-of-the-line hardware, infrastructure support and technical expertise.

With APL’s Basestack — a modular, open-source software suite — previously difficult and unwieldy applications that required powerful hardware and high-speed internet can be run locally, on off-the-shelf laptops, by way of a clean and intuitive interface. The tool has had an immediate impact on the global genomic surveillance efforts during the pandemic and, in 2021, was used in more than 20 countries for genomic infectious disease surveillance.

PFAS, or perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a group of some 5,000 artificial chemicals commonly found in water, household items, food packaging, firefighting foams and a plethora of other industrial applications. They’re also, consequently, found in wildlife and human beings. Their tendency to linger indefinitely in the environment without degrading has earned PFAS the label “forever chemicals.”

APL scientists devised a unique, inexpensive and scalable method for destroying these dangerous chemicals. APL’s PFAS elimination technique uses a novel, cost-effective catalyst to induce an electrochemical reaction that breaks the powerful carbon-fluorine (C-F) bonds that hold these toxic chemicals together. The method does not generate undesirable byproducts and fits a variety of governmental, civilian and commercial applications.

The subset seekers, a joint effort between APL and JHM, sought to tackle one of the toughest challenges health care workers faced during the COVID-19 pandemic — predicting which patients would develop a severe or mild case of the disease. Led by APL electrical engineer Will Gray Roncal and Dr. Brian Garibaldi, director of the Johns Hopkins Biocontainment Unit, the team triaged data collected from 1,182 COVID-19 patients and created an algorithm to predict the most likely course a patient would take two weeks from the time they were admitted to the hospital. The team’s model could also be applied to other acute diseases that lead to hospitalizations.

This is the latest Fast Company honor for APL, which most recently took home No. 3 honors on the magazine’s Most Innovative Space Companies list and has earned three consecutive elections to the Best Workplaces for Innovators list. In 2020, four Laboratory projects earned nods as World Changing Ideas finalists.