CAE designs ventilator prototype in 11 days

CAE Inc., best known as an aerospace manufacturer, has developed an easy-to-build ventilator with hopes of making 10,000 over the next three months to treat COVID-19 patients in Canada.

The Montreal-based company predominantly makes flight simulators for the aviation industry and offers training services for civil pilots and the defence sector, but has a small healthcare division that builds realistic, mannequin patient simulators for healthcare training.

As vanishing demand for air travel continues to wallop the aerospace sector, CAE shifted gears to create a ventilator after McGill University issued a challenge for an easy-to-use, low-cost ventilator design. Twelve of CAE’s healthcare engineers designed a prototype in just 11 days, chief technology officer Marc St-Hilaire said in an interview Thursday.

CAE is retooling its manufacturing line to produce the ventilator, which has less than 100 parts that cost about $5,000 per unit, even though it has not yet received Health Canada approval.

“We have enough assurance from the government that we are proceeding ahead full blast,” St-Hilaire said.

CAE is scaling up its ventilator team to 50 people and expects to have hundreds working on the assembly line — St-Hilaire said he’ll volunteer for production, too. A single ventilator will take about five hours to build.

CAE is working with other players in the aerospace sector to source the parts through their vast global supply chain. Making ventilators will “definitely not” be a long-term part of its business model, St-Hilaire said, leading to a spirit of collaboration in the industry.

“This is a wartime effort, that’s why we’re seeing so much collaboration amongst everyone … we’re not in a competitive mode,” he said.

“We’re all proceeding forward on good faith, wanting to help Canada, wanting to save our parents, our neighbours, our friends. That’s what motivates everybody.”

A ventilator essentially requires parts to pump air, valves to control pressure, sensors to monitor pressure and electronics so health care workers can monitor what’s happening. CAE, which spends about $2 billion annually with global parts suppliers, has the ability to make all the electronics and metal parts in-house. What it needs are valves.

While Canada has the industrial capacity to build the required parts, CAE is seeking global suppliers so it can get them more quickly. It expects some parts will be priced at a premium given the demand rush.

CAE hopes to deliver its first ventilator in three weeks.

The coronavirus pandemic hit during positive times for CAE, which builds flight simulators for Boeing 737 Max aircraft. It reported a surge in demand for both its simulators and its training services as airlines prepared for the 737 Max fleet to return to the skies after two fatal crashes resulted in a global grounding of the jets.

CAE isn’t the only Canadian firm working to build ventilators. On Thursday, Canada’s advanced manufacturing supercluster, NGen Canada, threw its support behind a ventilator designed by Winnipeg-based Cerebra Health Inc.

Cerebra’s Winnipeg Ventilator was designed by company founder Dr. Magdy Younes, licensed to major manufacturers and used as the basis for tens of thousands of machines in global ICUs through the 1990s and 2000s, including during the SARS epidemic.

The supercluster will work with leading Canadian medical device manufacturers to update the ventilator’s design for broad distribution and low-cost manufacturing. Starfish Medical, Canada’s largest medical device design firm, will lead the project.

“The Winnipeg Ventilator has proven worldwide to meet those requirements as seen through its broad use,” supercluster CEO Jay Myers said in a statement.