While hospitals across the U.S. faced a possible shortage of mechanical ventilators due to COVID-19, a self-assembled “skunk works” team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) worked tirelessly to prototype a simple ventilator design for quick and easy assembly from available parts. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory says that the design, dubbed the “Novel Emergency Response Ventilator” (NERVe), is derived from proven concepts and contains parts that are not being used by commercial ventilator manufacturers, to avoid disrupting already thin supply chains. It is designed to meet the functional requirements of COVID-19 patients requiring mechanical ventilation, including a simple user interface, air flow circuits for inhalation and exhalation, and alarms to notify physicians if air pressures get too low. It can operate in a continuous ventilation mode — common for late-stage COVID-19 patients — but can adapt to patients who spontaneously breathe on their own.