Old robots put to new use in probably futile vaping study

February 22, 2019

in which $20M will be spent and thus wasted.  Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center researchers are using old robot smoking machines for a new use.  These ancient bots were once used to determine the effects of cigarettes on the health of a body.  For some reason beyond common sense, Roswell Park has a new $20 million study to determine the health effects of electronic cigarettes.

Andrew Hyland, who is the Health Behavior Department Chair had this to say about the old smokebots; "They're just adapted so that they kind of fit the technology that's used for the e-cigarettes, but in principle, you smoke them or you consume them," continuing; "There's smoke or vapor that comes off and then you can analyze that. Some of the studies that we've done is we blow that smoke or that vapor over cells and see how they mutate."

"Sometimes you may have something that's generally regarded as safe in a liquid form, often even some of these flavors they're safe to eat," Hyland said. "But when you burn them, when you burn those chemicals, they turn into different chemicals. Sometimes, they are not so safe when you burn them. So what you get in the package isn't always what you get when you vape it."

Which is amazing considering the point of vaping is you don't burn anything.  Heat is applied when you vape, of course, but that does not mean burning, obviously. Now we get to the actually interesting part of the study which does make sense, even though in this writers opinion the method of using a piece of engineering which was specifically designed for one thing for another entirely different thing isn't exactly sound science.  You wouldn't use a rake to shovel snow off your driveway, but you technically could!  

"Basically, it's a big chemistry problem, because it's the chemicals that are in there that one perceives to be a cherry flavor or cinnamon or whatever the flavor might be," Hyland said. "So understanding how those chemicals interact with the other compounds in the vapor and then in the body is key to understanding what the toxicity of those products are."

There's the meat of the issue, the food safe flavoring ingredients used in vaping products, which by all means should be thoroughly scientifically investigated, but repurposing old equipment designed for something else entirely should be ringing alarm bells and raising red flags. To start, this won't work based on puffing patterns alone, as they vastly differ from cigarettes, not to mention we're talking about varying temperatures involved in producing the vape across a wide variety of devices.  

Vaporizers aren't just as simple as cigarettes.  It's not always as simple as just pressing a button and then puffing away, you have to pay attention to all kinds of things like; liquid levels, liquid PG/VG ratios, types of coils, and most importantly the flavor.  You can't just puff on it consistently until the tank or pod is empty, when it starts tasting bad you change the coil or if it overheats you stop using it until the coil cools off.  Some eLiquids (not Northland's) can cause premature wicking material degradation because of sweeteners or the flavoring used so different puffing patterns will have to be determined for every single individual eLiquid they want to test.

On top of all that consistent airflow can't be used, that's not now the vapes are used in real time by vapers.  Every puff a vaper tastes they can essentially control the temperature of the coil by decreasing or increasing the airflow by inhaling differently, or when a coil first starts to degrade the user increases airflow to keep the coil cool until it is no longer desirable for use.

To summarize, there's a lot more variables involved in vaping eLiquids that simply cannot be accounted for with recycled cigarette testing robots.  There should definitely be more research done related to vaping flavorings used in eLiquids, but it needs to be rigorous science.

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