Mass medical ventilator prototype finished at Óbuda University
The development of a prototype mass medical ventilator has been completed at Óbuda University. The machine could potentially save the lives of many critically ill Covid patients.
The university said in a statement on Friday that the mobile mass ventilator can also be used outside of a hospital setting and it can be adjusted to fit individual needs.
The project dubbed MassVentil
was launched by the university last year with the involvement of engineers, medical doctors, physicists and mathematicians. The prototype fits into an easily transportable container and adds new functions to individual ventilators. It enables the simultanous monitoring of several patients while protecting health-care staff by automatically filtering the air exhaled by the patients, the statement said.
As we reported before, many helping hands and minds contributed to the success of the project. Thanks to the volunteer team of the MassVentil Project, under the leadership of Miklós Kozlovszky MD and with the support of the University of Óbuda, the first modular mass ventilation system developed in Hungary will be built, which will be suitable for
the care of up to fifty patients battling with the coronavirus at the same time.
The members of the project explained to Magyar Nemzet in January that they are already in the preparatory stage of the preclinical testing of the system, after which the clinical trial may follow, now with the involvement of people. The developers also reported that growing and increasingly strict requirements as a result of the coronavirus epidemic pose new challenges for them, so they are currently working on a prototype that can be built into a container.
“During the development in recent months,
we had to develop a number of prototypes
in order to prove the functionality of the original mass ventilation concept in all respects. However, in addition to the test environment, the system must also be tested on living organisms, so the preparation of animal testing is currently underway,” reported to Magyar Nemzet the professional team of the MassVentil Project.
The members of the volunteer group described the current phase of the development: during the animal testing, they examined whether there were any microscopically observable lung tissue injuries after long artificial ventilation cycles. However, these studies should not be performed on humans, but if the preclinical trials are successful, clinical trials may follow, now involving humans.
According to them, this phase will be followed by the production phase, when a prototype version will be made. Then, a series of different tests and authorisations are needed for
mass production and marketing,
which require a manufacturer of professional medical devices. “We are now working to make the invention a real product on the market with the help of such a collaboration,” the developers said.
They added that they are very close to a solution and noted that this pace is extremely fast in the market for this type of medical device, where similar developments typically take four to eight years.
Source: MTI