Coalition fights COVID-19 with innovative products

A Vancouver theatre is about to be transformed into a showcase for innovative medical equipment developed in Canada to fight COVID -19.

Among the products is a ventilator that can be built with locally sourced materials anywhere in the world for less than $500. The new gravity-based ventilator is meant to address a shortage of ventilators that are critical for saving the lives of patients with acute COVID-19.

A kind of “field hospital” to demonstrate new products to fight COVID -19 is being built in the Arts Club by Olympic Village over the next four weeks.

Dr. Christopher Nguan said COSMIC Medical has grown since February into a multidisciplinary and collaborative group of more than 130 scientists, doctors, medical students, engineers, physicists, and designers. “We’re open-source, non-profit, everything is on the table. We’re fully transparent,” said Nguan, a kidney transplant surgeon at Vancouver General Hospital and associate professor at the University of B.C.

“All we’re interested in is making an impact on COVID. Whatever it takes for us to do that, that’s what we want to do.”

COSMIC stands for Collective Open Source Medical Innovations for COVID-19. Nguan is one of three co-leads along with Alexander Waslen, a fourth-year mechanical engineering student at UBC, and Philip Edgcumbe, a medical student at UBC and biomedical engineer.

The group’s first success is gVent. Invented in six weeks, it’s a lowcost ventilator that two people can build in three hours. A ventilator helps a seriously ill patient breathe when he or she can’t do so on their own.

Traditional low-cost ventilators are between $5,000 and $50,000. They use technology to blow or compress air.

But Chase Crisfield, a Rossland resident and medical student at the University of B.C., had a new idea.

“When I saw some of the other designs,” Crisfield said in a video about gVent, “I felt they lacked a physiological mechanism behind them. I wanted to develop something that was gentle on the lungs, knowing how fragile and inflamed the lung tissue can be when someone is sick.”

Nguan said gVent’s unique design doesn’t use a compressor or blower.

“We have an inverted piston with a water seal. It’s kind of like having a water bottle with the bottom cut off and you squish it down into a bucket of water. That head of pressure you generate by pushing the bottle down and trapped air inside the bottle is the air that goes to the patient.”

The gVent’s simple design, he said, makes it ideal for making it quickly in disaster situations and for fighting COVID -19 in developing countries in Latin America and Africa, where traditional ventilators are in short supply.

COSMIC Medical’s ventilator was awarded $100,000 as top prize in the Roche Canada COVID-19 Innovation Challenge, beating out more than 840 applicants.

It’s now awaiting Health Canada approval, a process that could take until August.

But the group isn’t waiting. Nguan said COSMIC Medical will publish designs online as soon as they work out how to protect the group and its volunteers from any legal liability. He expects that to happen within a few weeks.

Other COVID-19 products the group is developing include a snorkel mask and bubble helmet.

Nguan said COSMIC Medical will be using Studio A in the Arts Club to show how its products work together in a hospital setting. As well, it will provide a place for COSMIC Medical volunteers to physically meet in one space.

As a co-founder, Nguan said he’s met only five people physically and 30 people remotely via Zoom.

He also plans for the theatre to be a venue where other local groups can bring their COVID -19 medical designs and prototypes and see which ones are best.

“Everybody wants to make a difference,” he said about COSMIC Medical volunteers.

“We’re only in it for the benefit of patients and health-care providers.”