Long stretches of empty supermarket shelves and shortages of essential supplies are only the visible impacts to consumers of the global supply-chain disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Unseen are the production stoppages in locations across China and other countries and the shortages of raw materials, subassemblies, and finished goods that make up the backstory of the impact.

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (Covid-19) outbreak is unprecedented in its scale and severity for humans and supply chains, not to mention medical professionals and governments scrambling to contain it.

Businesses dependent on global sourcing are facing hard choices in crisis management amid the supply chain disruptions. But in planning to mitigate the risks of similar disruptions in future, they confront other questions that have no easy answers: Should they broaden their supplier choices, or do more local or near-shore sourcing? How much inventory of raw materials, subassemblies, and finished products should they stock to tide over the crisis?

We [Alan Rudolph and Raymond Goodrich] are both biotechnology researchers and are currently seeking to repurpose an existing medical manufacturing platform to quickly develop a vaccine candidate for Covid-19.

This process is used for the treatment of blood products such as plasma, platelets, and whole blood to prevent disease transmission when people receive transfused blood. It utilizes a common food ingredient, vitamin B2, or riboflavin, which is a light-sensitive chemical. When used in combination with ultraviolet light of specific wavelengths, B2 can alter genetic material, whether RNA or DNA, of infectious pathogens in the blood, making them unable to transmit disease.

Those genetic changes prevent pathogens, such as viral, bacterial, and parasitic contaminants, in blood from replicating. By stopping the replication process, the method protects people from disease they could acquire through a blood transfusion.

F unction often relates to form, and this is particularly true within the world of manufacturing. Rigorous quality assessment procedures ensure that components are manufactured according to their precise specifications before being assembled into the fully functioning whole. These assessments might include tasks such as geometric product specifications, fracture analysis, and surface roughness testing, and they form the core of quality control in many manufacturing processes. As such, identical tasks may be performed across industrial sectors as diverse as medical engineering, electronics, and the automotive industry. This article explores the limitations of existing approaches to quality assessment within industry, and details how opto-digital technology can be used as a more efficient alternative.

Techniques commonly used to accomplish tasks in quality assessment include contact profilometry and traditional light microscopy, and these demand a high level of accuracy in both inspection and metrology. Although these successful approaches are heavily relied on within industrial quality assessment, the novel approach of opto-digital microscopy is becoming an increasingly popular solution, bringing industrial quality control into the digital era.