Origin
Vapor products have the potential to transform public health. For the roughly one billion people worldwide who smoke combustible cigarettes, well-designed vapor products can offer a dramatically less harmful alternative — moving users closer to the harmless end of the harm spectrum. But that potential is only realized if the products themselves are rigorously tested and well-understood.
The reality is that not all vapor products are created equal. What's in the aerosol, how much is delivered per puff, whether a cartridge leaks or clogs, how power affects emissions — these questions matter for public health, for consumer safety, and for the companies building these products. Careful, repeatable, data-rich testing is what separates products that advance harm reduction from products that undermine it.
But the laboratory tools available to answer these questions were designed for an earlier era. Traditional smoking machines were built for combustible cigarettes — wrong form factor, wrong airflow dynamics, wrong power delivery for modern vapes. The few alternatives that existed required constant cleaning (especially problematic with cannabis condensate), lacked integrated sensing, and couldn't scale to multi-channel parallel testing.
Gram was founded to bridge that gap — to build the testing equipment that this industry actually needs. Purpose-built for vapor products, with zero cleaning, integrated per-puff sensing, direct power control, and the throughput to keep up with a fast-moving market. Whether you're a cannabis producer qualifying hardware, a regulatory lab characterizing emissions, or a researcher studying the health effects of aerosol exposure, the UVM gives you the data to make informed decisions.
Impact
In 2019, a nationwide outbreak of severe lung injuries — later termed EVALI (E-cigarette or Vaping Product Use-Associated Lung Injury) — hospitalized over 2,800 people and killed 68. The cause was unknown. Vitamin E acetate, a thickening agent used in illicit THC vape cartridges, was the leading suspect, but the causal mechanism had not been demonstrated.
Researchers at the UCSF Cardiovascular Research Institute used the Gram Universal Vaping Machine to aerosolize vitamin E acetate under controlled conditions and expose lung tissue directly. Their study — "Dose-Dependent Pulmonary Toxicity of Aerosolized Vitamin E Acetate" — demonstrated that VEA causes dose-dependent lung injury, providing critical evidence for the causal link that helped resolve the crisis.
This is the kind of work the UVM was built for: generating precisely controlled aerosol exposures so that researchers can answer questions that matter for public health.
Location
Gram Research is a US-based company. We design, build, test, and ship every system from California — no outsourced manufacturing, no overseas supply chains for critical assemblies.
Whether you're setting up a new lab or scaling an existing testing program, we'd like to hear from you.
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