Current ventilators used in hospitals across the world to treat patients with COVID-19 are expensive and cumbersome. But, it doesn’t have to be that way. A team from Imperial College London has developed a simpler and cheaper ventilator. This product was initially designed to work as short-term emergency ventilators to deal with the coronavirus pandemic, but now the team believe it can also help address the shortage of ventilators in low-income countries.
In a paper published in the Frontiers in Medical Technology, the researchers revealed the RELAVENT ventilator and showed that the system performs equally well with gas supplies found in hospitals and home-use oxygen bottles. Instead of using expensive and complex control valves standard in most ventilators, the team developed a way to use simple on-off valves, which can still provide the high-level performance required of ICU ventilators. In effect, the team found a way to make the technology much cheaper but still as effective to treat patients in intensive care units.
With such promising results, the team hopes that, following approval as a medical device, the ventilators can be used in hospitals in newly emerging economies (NEE) and low/middle income countries (LMIC), which often suffer from a shortage of ventilators.
“ICU ventilators made by big manufacturers have always been too expensive and complex for developing countries to buy and maintain, so many of the less affluent parts of the world simply have minimal access to ventilators. In addition, most of the new ventilator designs created for COVID-19 were based on emergency short-term manufacturing and are not appropriate for long-term intensive care support, which is desperately needed in LMICs and NEEs”, said lead researcher Dr Joseph van Batenburg-Sherwood, of Imperial College London’s Department of Bioengineering.
To get approval as a medical device, the researchers are working on an advanced prototype which must be done following strict regulations. To do this, they’ve created Phaedra’s World Medical Limited, and the startup is currently looking for investment.
“RELAVENT delivers simple yet high-performance mechanical ventilation. Its versatility enables access to respiratory support across many different treatment areas and has the potential to save many lives. This has only been made possible by the efforts of the amazing Imperial College engineering team alongside clinical input from our medical advisor who has firsthand experience in our target markets”, said Liz Hughes, CEO of Phaedrus World Medical Limited.
In the long term, the team hopes their ventilator can be used in as many hospitals as possible to treat patients with severe respiratory diseases. This is the right technology to cover this medical need, and the researchers hope to attract investment to take it further.
Madekurozwa M, Bonneuil W, Frattolin J, Watson D, Moore A, Stevens M, Moore Jr J, Mathiszig-Lee J and van Batenburg-Sherwood J (2021) A Novel Ventilator Design for COVID-19 and Resource-Limited Settings. Front. Med. Technol., | https://doi.org/10.3389/fmedt.2021.707826