When a public building catches fire, its built-in systems automatically respond: Smoke alarms blare, sprinklers kick on, and occupants quickly evacuate.

But what if the life-threatening danger isn’t fire but invisible airborne contaminants that can make occupants sick? Could a similar smart-building system monitor and improve the quality of the air indoors, where Americans spend 90 percent of their time?

With a contract for up to $40 million from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), an ambitious multi-institutional research team led by Virginia Tech and including researchers at the University of California, Davis, aims to create just such a system.

“The knowledge that comes out of this project will mean that when you go into a classroom, office, restaurant, or other building that has adopted the solutions from this research, the air is going to be cleaner and safer than it was before,” said project lead Linsey Marr, University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech. “That will mean that you have fewer days of illness, fewer missed workdays, and a better quality of life.”

“This project will lead to significant public health and economic benefits,” said Richard Corsi, dean of engineering at UC Davis and a contributor to the project. “I am thrilled that researchers in the UC Davis College of Engineering will play a key role in this novel and important effort.”

The research

The research project, called Bioaerosol Risk Assessment interVention Engineering (BRAVE), has a goal of reducing respiratory illnesses, like cold, flu and asthma by 25 percent with its own innovative clean-air version of a fire suppression system. Here’s how it works:

• A biosensor acts like a smoke alarm, using real-time detection of 25 viruses, bacteria, allergens, and fungi in the air, including SARS-CoV-2, influenza, respiratory syncytial virus, Legionella, and Stachybotrys chartarum, commonly known as black mold.
• Next, a suite of computational modeling software analyzes data from the building’s biosensors and other sources to assess risk for building occupants.
• When the risk is high, the sensor automatically communicates with the building’s systems to amp up ventilation with more outdoor air, increase filtration, or turn on germicidal UV lights in the ducts — interventions that have been proven to reduce concentrations of bioaerosols and reduce risk of illness.
• The system may even issue alerts and recommend behavior changes, like going outside or reducing building occupancy. But most of the time it will operate in the background, adjusting things as quietly as a thermostat.

The team will conduct the initial round of testing in daycare centers, where “there are lots of pathogens around, kids are getting sick, and their getting sick impacts parents and the whole community,” said Marr. “It's like a fire, and you want to put out the fire where it starts.” But what researchers learn there will be relevant in almost any communal setting, including classrooms, supermarkets, hospitals, and airports.

With the BRAVE approach implemented in these buildings, researchers expect that fewer children, parents, and workers will get sick, leading not only to higher levels of health and well-being, but to reduced absenteeism and improved productivity that makes clear that better indoor air quality is worth the investment.

“The ability to monitor pathogens and allergens in the air in real time will allow us to transform the way our buildings operate to make them actively work to keep us healthy,” said Chris Cappa, professor of civil and environmental engineering and UC Davis’ project lead. “This has the potential to be one of the biggest advances in how we think about the air inside buildings since the advent of air conditioning.”

UC Davis will lead the implementation and assessment phase of the project. This includes integration of new biosensors and risk software with the building systems, and measuring the effectiveness of these efforts at reducing exposure of occupants to harmful pathogens or allergens and improving their health.

The collaborators

Marr will be the principal investigator of a large, highly interdisciplinary team, with subprojects led by Cappa, Rajan Chakrabarty from Washington University in St. Louis and Madhav Marathe from the University of Virginia. Other collaborating institutions include: the University of Michigan; Yale University; Pennsylvania State University; Emory University; Johnson Controls; Signature Science, LLC and Varro Life Sciences, Inc. 

Other UC Davis investigators include Co-director Theresa Pistochini, Research Director Sarah Outcault and Research Engineer Christy Green, all at the Western Cooling Efficiency Center; Professor Jeffrey Hoch in the Department of Public Health Sciences and Professor Matthew Ellis, Department of Chemical Engineering. 

“We’ve brought together an incredibly strong team of world-class experts in lots of different topics to focus on this one problem, because that's what we need to make a big leap forward,” said Marr. “There was a flurry of activity about indoor air inspired by the pandemic, and now we need to take the next step.”

The funding and the industry partners

ARPA-H is a government agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that supports the development of high-impact solutions to society’s most challenging health problems. Its Building Resilient Environments for Air and Total Health (BREATHE) program, through which the team’s contract is funded, focuses on smart building systems that monitor and respond to changes in indoor air quality as a way to revolutionize public health.

The initial round of funding is $20 million, with additional tranches up to a total of $40 million over the next five years.

Ultimately, the team plans to commercialize its research so that the whole-building system, including biosensors, software, and engineering interventions, becomes a turnkey technology widely available for installation in buildings.