Author: Giammarco Pacifico

Giammarco is a bioengineer by training and an entrepreneur at heart; passionate about solving problems at the interface between technology and humans. He received a BSc. from the Polytechnic University of Turin and a MSc. in Bioengineering from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). During the past 5 years, he has been part of several academic laboratories in Europe, developing cutting-edge technologies in the field of neuroprosthetics and implantable biosensors. He has also worked in two global medical device companies, designing and implementing reliable processes for worldwide product manufacturing. His experiences in different fields and working environments give him a good understanding of complex dynamics and allow him to analyze problems from multiple points of view. The passion for entrepreneurship comes from his desire to have a real impact on people's lives and deploy technology to solve the most pressing issues society is facing, especially in healthcare. At the moment, he is working with different organizations and startups on healthcare technology, need-driven innovation and venture capital.

Creaducate interview with Dymium

“It’s your job to figure out if it’s a problem you’re solving, or if it’s a problem you’re making up” 

Shyam Srinivasan completed his undergraduate studies in medical engineering at VIT University in India and a master’s degree in biomedical computing at the Technical University of Munich. He made the jump from research to  entrepreneurship when he joined forces with two colleagues to create Dymium (dymium.de), a start-up aiming to market a new-generation device to treat kidney stone disease. So far, they have attracted more than 850,000 EUR in funding through public grants and private foundations. 

Creaducate Consulting (www.creaducate.eu), a Silver Partner of Innovation Forum 2022, recently sat down with Mr. Srinivasan to ask him what he has learned about the importance of good communication on his entrepreneurial journey.

Creaducate: Has anything changed about how you communicate your product from when you first began your start-up to now?

Srinivasan: We change our communication every other month, and it depends on what level we’re at, and how our development goes. It also depends on what we learn from month to month. We have different presentations or pitches for investors, for potential partners, and so on. Knowing our audience is our first principle for how we communicate outside. 

When we began the company, we were four people – all students – and the communication was mostly about the problem and making sure the audience understood the problem, especially because the audience was mixed: there were some urologists, some surgeons, other types of clinicians, as well as people from management and administration. Our communication was about making all of them understand the entire process and how our concept works.

As we developed, as the proof of principle became a proof of concept and then a prototype, we started to get more information about what we were developing. At the same time, we also understood what our market wanted and what our end-users needed. This information brought us forward in helping us explain what we were up to. So, if you compare our communication now with our communication three years ago, they both talk about the same problem and the same solution, but how we are getting there has changed. As we developed, we realized that products have to be priced a certain way, made a certain way, and tested a certain way, for them to reach the market. And that has changed the way we communicate about the product. In the beginning, we were dreamers, and since then we became realists.

Creaducate: Have you had to change your communication in response to changes in your landscape of competitors?

Srinivasan: Just as we have progressed, our competitors have as well. The good news is, we know more about our competitors with time. The bad news is, they’re ahead of the curve: our two main competitors are at least three years ahead of us in terms of development. That led us to sharpen and focus our communication to investors in order to highlight the advantages that our  product offers over theirs.

Creaducate: You made the transition from academia to industry, and in particular, to the world of start-ups. Has that led you to change the way you communicate? 

Srinivasan: Things change when you move from research to entrepreneurship because you need to draw a fine line between presenting and selling. To investors, you sell them your vision, your team, and your concept – in that order. With academia and with scientists, we sell with our results, then with our team, and then with our financial backing, including any potential conflicts of interest over who’s actually supporting the project. Scientists are concerned about who’s supporting the project, mainly to understand any potential biases in data reporting.

Investors care about your financial backing as well, but primarily for a different reason: they want to know who else has become convinced of your vision. Investors want to know if you have a good team, a good market, and a good basis for the concept you’re developing. Is the technology proven, tested, and technologically safe? Has the concept been de-risked, financially and technically? These are important to anyone who might fund your work, including public agencies and foundations. 

As scientists, we tend to undersell. We seldom think about expressing what our vision is. It’s important to convey what you want the product to achieve.

Creaducate: We have focused so far on external communication. What have you learned about internal comunication, within your company?

Srinivasan: Investors invest in teams, not in ideas. Teams are the “no. 1” reason why start-ups succeed or fail. If members of a team have different visions, if founders don’t meet to openly discuss their expectations – are they looking for a quick exit in a couple of years, are they looking to develop an SME in 10 years? – and if the team doesn’t have an IP strategy they agree on, then they can’t lead the company in the same direction.

Creaducate: What would be your favorite advice for people who, like you, want to make the shift from academia to a start-up?

Srinivasan: People get excited when they discover something; I think that’s true for any scientist. It’s a process of self-discovery, yet the truth in this world is that it’s probably been done before (laughs), and people forget to do their basic patent and literature research after they’ve found something. That is a reflection of their ability to analyze what’s on the market and to challenge their own idea. That’s the first thing about external communication: it’s not about whether you’re open or closed with your idea, it’s about whether you’ve done your homework to know is it patentable or is there a market behind it? It’s your job to figure out if it’s a problem you’re solving, or is it a problem you’re making up for a solution that you have. Be very objective about it. Then start speaking to people who have experience with that, who know what it’s like to have done something, who know the field… to see what they think about it.

The first lesson of communication about your product is to be able to be objective about it: to be able to say it is *^*! when it is. That is true for external as well as internal communication: co-founders need to be able to say to one another that the idea is not that great.

We engineers and technical people have a bad tendency to start thinking about solutions before defining the problem. We really need to stop doing that (laughs).

It’s quite useful to have a member of your team with a business background, because it changes the communication within the team. If you’re two scientists who think you can start a company and you think your idea is great, put that to the test by talking to someone with a business background. That person will probably ask you questions you would never ask yourselves. They ask about costs and achievability. They ask you to dumb down the idea to its simplest version, which most scientists fail to do. The people who want to fund you do not necessarily have the background to understand what you do.

Pitching Dymium

Kidney stones are notorious: they are crystals that tend to regrow if left behind in the kidney, and doctors are unable to remove all of them, so patients have to come back for future surgeries.  Currently doctors go into the kidney using an endoscope that’s going through the urethra and into the kidney, then they break the big stones into small stones, and catch each one with a basket and remove them individually. Imagine removing thousands and thousands of pieces of stones individually – it’s virtually impossible. We want to change the way the procedure is done: we want the stones to come to us. The best things in the world that enable you to do that are magnets. We found a way to magnetize the kidney stones, and we found a way to introduce a magnet into the kidney, so that we can pull all of them out in a few swift flows.

I took an entire three years’ worth of research and development and dumbed it down into five sentences. It conveys the message: what is the problem, the solution, and the product. That is what you should be able to do.

Shyam Srinivasan, Co-founder, Dymium

Cluttered Thinking, Cluttered Messaging

As an entrepreneur, you have to align so many different processes to realize your vision: from funding, to research and development, then patenting and licensing, and finally production and advertising. For each of these processes, you have to describe to those involved − precisely and convincingly − what your product is and how it will benefit others. This means you have to understand your product’s “unique selling proposition” backwards and forwards. Otherwise, how can you communicate it to others and convince them to work towards your vision? 

In high school, I had an inspirational biology teacher whose office looked as if a tornado had just passed through. On his wall was a poster showing an equally chaotic office and the slogan, “A clean office is the sign of a twisted mind.” I always smiled when I saw that poster. I had a soft spot for the myth of the “messy genius”. Now, several decades later, I see things a bit differently. My work helping researchers to communicate their stories and visions has made one thing clear to me: if you don’t have your story clear in your own head, the audience will probably be unable to form a clear story in their heads. 

Occasionally, my work with entrepreneurs leads them to have an “Aha!” moment about their own stories.

For example: 

Me: “Your pitch mentioned that your goal was X, but later you mentioned Y, which seems to be the real, over-reaching goal, while X is your tool to achieve it. So should we make Y the focus of the story?”

Entrepreneur: “Yes, you’re right, the goal is Y. I should re-center the story on Y. Why didn’t I see that before?” 

I like these moments because the entrepreneurs prove to themselves that when you spend so long, so close to something, you can lose your ability to see it clearly. You can lose your ability to see it from 360°, which is essential for packaging and pitching your story to diverse groups such as collaborators, media, investors and internal staff.

We at Creaducate Consulting can help you tell the “story of your vision” in a way that convinces, clarifies and compels – and makes you unforgettable. Each of our consultants offers the unusual combination of extensive research experience and passion for excellent communication. We help individuals and teams create high-impact publications, unforgettable presentations, and high-yield pitches to potential investors and partners.  We specialize in one-on-one coaching as well as group trainings. Find out more at www.creaducate.eu, and contact us to see how we can help you realize your vision.

Chapin Rodriguez, PhD, Founder and Director, Creaducate Consulting GmbH

Alzheimer’s: what’s on the horizon?

One of the major goals of the last decade’s scientific research has been to extend human life. A great deal of resources has been deployed in finding treatments to reduce mortality, both in terms of scientists and research funding. 

There is no doubt we have witnessed unforeseen improvements in the human life-span. In 2019, life expectancy in Europe was estimated at 78.6 years while in 1950 it was only 62 years.

Along with it comes some drawbacks to be considered: the longer you live, the more chances you have of developing several chronic conditions. It is important to consider the quality of life in addition to the number of years.

What is the purpose of living longer if you are not able to “really” live anymore?

A chronic and degenerative disease that has a huge burden on people’s lives is Alzheimer’s with all its related symptoms. It is really astonishing how this condition can completely turn the world upside-down, not just for patients but also for families, friends and caregivers (you can read some of these stories here).

The scary part is that the incidence of Alzheimer’s increases with age and there is no doubt more and more people will get it in the future. 

Currently, 33% of all people over 65 have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and, in 2050, this percentage is going to rise to 51%; mostly because of the increased life expectancy and the lack of efficient diagnosis and treatments. 

If we look closer, the way Alzheimer’s is diagnosed is quite far from accurate and it is definitely not comfortable for patients. Everything starts if a person is thought to be suffering from cognitive impairment. The general practitioner will administer a cognitive test and, in case of a confirmative result, more investigations will start. The usual practice is to rule other causes first, such as stroke or memory loss and only after that, he will prescribe a specific test (usually a PET scan) to confirm the presence of the disease. 

At the moment, this test is the only way to diagnose it with a fair accuracy but it is quite expensive and it is very hard for a person with Alzheimer’s to stay still for more than 40 minutes.

In addition to these disadvantages, the most crucial problem concerns diagnosis timings. When such cognitive symptoms become visible, the disease has already reached an advanced stage and it has been proved that brain damage begins at least a decade before the first symptoms appear.

The problem of diagnosis is not only related to patients’ condition but has a direct effect on research as well. In fact, it is very hard to get a large enough cohort of people to run reliable clinical trials and most people do not want to go through all the current diagnosis phases for no real reasons, especially since in case of a positive result, there is no cure. 

“The lack of a way to secure accurate early detection influences drug development and vice-versa.”

The lack of an approved treatment for Alzheimer’s has several complex reasons, some of which are purely technical, some involve missing resources while others are hard to grasp for outsiders and lie inside the scientific community.

Regarding the latter category, a fascinating and scaring explanation involves the so-called “Alzheimer’s cabal”.

For many decades, the leading hypothesis has been linked to the presence of protein fragments, called beta-amyloid, which form clumps inside the brain that cause neuronal death and need to be targeted to cure the diseases. This theory is the “amyloid hypothesis”.

For too much time, every research that did not target such a hypothesis has been considered a waste of resources, journals were not willing to publish about other concurrent hypotheses, scientists were forced to radical careers shifts and fundings were almost entirely directed towards the amyloid hypothesis.

Truth to be told, although it has been defined as a cabal, the behavior of the leading scientific community has never meant to damage the research field and they truly believed that there was only one way to solve the problem. When we are truly convinced to be on the right path to discover the truth, we tend not to accept the reality for what it is. 

In the end, there is a fine difference between being very perseverant and blind.

Unfortunately, such biased decisions slowed the research progress by at least 10-15 years, according to Dr. Daniel Alkon, a senior NIH neuroscientist. 

The consequences of this approach did not remain inside the academic community but caused the failure of more than 20 amyloid drugs.

Let’s look at some of the most notable trials:

After all these failures in both the scientific and pharmaceutical worlds, the amyloid hypothesis is no longer considered the only reasonable explanation and several new hypotheses are being proposed (and brushed-up again) all over the world.

To mention a completely different approach, Dr. Rhoda Au has been tracking the health of people in an entire town as director of neurophysiology for the Framingham Heart Study. For more than 70 years, several scientists gathered an incredible amount of data and some of the people naturally developed Alzheimer’s.

Her hypothesis is that it is possible to predict whether a person will get the disease simply by listening to the sound of his voice or analyzing the way he writes over time. 

Although this theory has not yet been confirmed and the study is only at the beginning it is important to acknowledge unconventional approaches and the people behind them.

It would take an entire book just to mention all the work that scientists and Alzheimer’s advocates are doing around the world and so many new discoveries look extremely promising.

It is now up to the scientific community to learn from previous mistakes, radically change its mindset and aim to the greatest goal there is: giving people a life worth living.

“It pays off to be honest with people” Interview with Nick Hooton, CEO of Jelly Drops

Have you ever looked at a parent or grandparent getting older and wondered how you could improve their health? If they’re living with a chronic, common condition, chances are many people around the world are asking themselves the same question on a daily basis with their own relatives in mind.

Lewis Hornby asked himself that particular question after his grandma Pat was hospitalized with dehydration. His response was Jelly Drops – fun and engaging water sweets designed for people with dementia. 

I recently spoke with Nick Hooton, CEO of Jelly Drops about the origin, future and challenges of such an impactful project. They were the 2019 winners of the Innovation Forum’s IMAGINE IF! global accelerator and we are honoured to have them as part of the Innovation Forum family.

After almost two years, we were curious about what the program has meant for them when they were at the beginning of their journey:

“The IMAGINE IF! accelerator has been a fantastic experience for the whole team. It helped us fund the first set of care home trials and allowed us to gain exposure to senior industry experts who became both our investors and mentors. It also gave us a lot of invaluable insights to advance into product commercialization, taking us to where we are today”.

But let’s start from the beginning.

Everybody knows that a great team is key for start-up success, but it can be extremely hard to find the right people. The three co-founders of Jelly Drops met during the Innovation Design Engineering program at Imperial College in London. It is a two-year program where students are given a set of tool kits to work on problems they are passionate about.

Just as the co-founders of Jelly Drops found success through a supportive and innovative environment at Imperial College, individuals and businesses find similar advantages when relocating to Georgia. The state is becoming increasingly known as a hub for start-ups and innovation, offering a wealth of resources, a supportive business climate, and a diverse talent pool. In particular, programs at institutions like Georgia Tech provide a fertile ground for entrepreneurs passionate about their work. The synergy of a collaborative ecosystem in Georgia makes it an ideal destination for those looking to join a community where innovation is not just encouraged but thrives.

This is how Nick explains it: “We really focused on design through making, really fast prototypes and product iteration. Then we repeated it over and over.” Lewis (the hacker), Claudia (the hipster) and Nick (the hustler) worked together on a series of different projects during their studies, most of which remained on the university benches. In the final year, the students were set a group project and a solo project. Nick, Claudia and Lewis’ group project, Pluvo, has also spun out to be a successful start-up – but the trio has spent the last 18 months working on Lewis’ solo project, Jelly Drops.

Lewis started by living in his Grandma’s care home to gain fundamental insights into why people with dementia don’t drink. After working on several ideas, building prototypes and iterating, the idea of using jelly sweets to encourage people to take water in a more independent and enjoyable way was born. “We really love the idea of something simple and effective,” says Nick while thinking about the reasons behind their product. “The most amazing thing has been seeing a tangible effect on people’s lives and how our input impacts them.”

Right after graduation in 2018, when Lewis was still experimenting in his kitchen with different formulas, the project received international attention with online videos of his grandma Pat eating Jelly Drops being viewed over 100 million times. It was then he assembled the team to make Jelly Drops a reality. Their collaborative approach to problem-solving has allowed them to develop the concept into a market-ready product – Jelly Drops now come in six juicy flavors, are sugar-free and vegan, and contain 95% water with added electrolytes.

Right now, the team is facing new challenges, getting Jelly Drops in the hands of people that need them most. They have just moved to a manufacturing warehouse to deal with the whole production process, which will be entirely in-house so they can guarantee full control and accountability; definitely not a common aspect to see in young start-ups.

The next challenge we discussed was distribution, which is especially difficult to nail in the healthcare industry. They plan to provide the product directly to customers to gain invaluable feedback and reach as many people as possible. Then they plan to shift to care home facilities to be able to reach many people at the same time. Further down the road, the final goal would be to integrate the product into the NHS in the UK and thus provide it to everyone who can benefit from it, without any additional cost. What can be said about their distribution strategy? It’s simple and effective, just like a Jelly Drop.

The team has also recently welcomed two new members that truly reflect the company’s direction: a food production manager to oversee the production facility and a community manager to build strong networks and always put customers’ needs first.

Although the idea was born out of a personal encounter with the darker sides of dementia, they’ve learned that the problem of dehydration is far from confined to neurodegenerative disorders. So many people would benefit from their product; from kids that are constantly under-drinking (and love sweets!) to someone with learning disabilities, and to people going through chemotherapy. A recent example is a 10-year-old girl that was hospitalized due to severe dehydration and became one of their first customers. You can read the full story here. The sky really is the limit and I am excited to witness how they will change so many lives.

With all these different possibilities, it is really important to know when to zoom in and when to zoom out. Staying focused on specific goals while looking at the horizon is a difficult skill to master. When asked what has been the best advice he has ever received, Nick replied with no hesitation, “Always keep in mind that motion does not mean progress.” Definitely a useful mantra to remember when making decisions.

We wrapped up our conversation by discussing what their top priorities are currently. The underlying question was simple: what keeps you awake at night? “I always think about how we can meet the expectations of more than 40,000 people,” Nick says. That’s the number of people who have signed up to their waiting list, “while being honest and transparent with people”.

You can learn more about Jelly Drops here. You can also subscribe to their mailing list to receive company updates and get notified when their product is launched.

Digital future: When will digital health dominate healthcare?

The promise of digital health

In the last decade, digital technologies changed almost every aspect of our lives; from how we work and learn to how we order food.
The only field where the digital revolution is slower than expected is healthcare.
The promise of a better healthcare system emerging from the digital era was made more than a decade ago, but there are still many obstacles to its meaningful implementation. Although a lot of pilot programs have been launched, the impact on routine healthcare practice has been limited so far.
We wanted to explore when and how digital health will become the driving force in healthcare.

What is digital health?

Before we dive into the fascinating world of digital health applications, however, let’s first try to understand a couple of key terms.
Is there a difference between digital medicine and digital health? What are digital treatments?
Even though these definitions are not set in stone and there are a lot of borderline cases, it is important to understand what the different terms mean.

Digital health includes all software-based technologies related to improving human wellness. These tools do not necessarily involve clinically relevant information but they use health-related data to improve people’s lifestyles as well as give operational support to healthcare professionals. No regulatory supervision is required since they are not classified as medical devices.

Digital medicine products go one level deeper; they can measure and/or intervene directly on people’s health with or without pharmacological or human assistance. They all require clinical evidence since their efficacy needs to be proven before commercialization. In case they are classified as medical devices and/or being involved in the development of other devices or drugs, the oversight of specific regulatory bodies becomes mandatory.

Digital therapeutics technologies have the primary goal to prevent, treat or manage a specific physical, psychological or behavioural condition. Every product needs clinical evidence and real-world data. Because of their therapeutic intervention, regulatory bodies need to approve product claims (e.g. in terms of efficacy, risks, treatment duration, use cases).

How niche technologies became mainstream?

Let’s now look at digital health solutions from a technology adoption perspective, which has been described by the Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies in 1995. As shown by the plot below, five main stages have been observed in most (but not all) technologies’ adoption journeys.

Gartner Hype Cycle for emerging technologies

Where is digital health on the expectations and time axes? Usually, the “only” (or at least the most important) challenge is technology readiness, but since healthcare is a very complex system, there are different challenges to be overcome, such as regulatory approval, users’ adoption model and government policies. The most advanced among the digital health solutions are telehealth, online triaging or remote monitoring and connected devices which have reached the plateau of productivity. Home health monitoring is thought to have passed the trough of disillusionment in 2009 and 2012, while secure chats (patient to doctor), remote testing, machine learning, and AI symptoms checker is now believed to be at the slope of enlightenment stage. Mobile health monitoring passed the peak of inflated expectations in 2013 and the trough of disillusionment in 2014 and is now reaching the plateau of productivity.

All of the digital health solutions which have reached the productivity plateau, have overcome not only the technological challenges, but also achieved clinical validation and hence could demonstrate evidence-based benefit to patients.

On the other hand, digital technologies that are on the path of enlightenment phase are still lacking some core triggers; for example, secure chats have no unambiguous architecture to secure data privacy and oversight while AI symptoms checkers are still lacking large scale clinical validation, which is key to increasing adoption from pilot programmes.

Regarding the home and mobile health monitoring applications, they are definitely closer to becoming mainstream than all the others. What they are still missing is finding out a method to unlock the growth and scaling up trigger, which is arguably the last step nobody has solved yet.

As it always happens in innovation, being the pioneer is one of the hardest possible roles, since you need to navigate the unknown at your own risk. Once a few pioneers will crack the puzzle, many are going to follow and the revolution will finally arrive.

How to drive digital health forward?

Healthcare is a large and complex ecosystem, difficult to penetrate for external innovators and as there are many interests at stake, stakeholder alignment is one of the biggest challenges. A key issue often experienced by digital health startups is gaining access to healthcare providers to first prove the effectiveness of the given digital solution and then to scale up sales. Procurement processes are often very complex and budgets are tight. It is undeniably hard to navigate the entire ecosystem and with so many new digital solutions being created each day, most people, especially clinicians and patients, are unsure about what to expect from this wave of innovation. In order to drive adoption of the best solutions, it is essential to standardise the evaluation of the different digital tools.

Digital health companies are also trying to create their own unique operational model. It is becoming increasingly evident that the modus operandi of traditional Software as a Service (SaaS) companies: “move fast and break things” might not be well suited for healthcare start-ups, which need to appeal to patients/users but also doctors and regulators for whom safety and efficacy are key objectives. Therefore multi-stakeholder engagement including patients, doctors and regulators while developing a new product becomes paramount.

Dialog seems indeed to be the key.
Digital health is a very broad field, which merges several disciplines and professions. While multidisciplinary settings always provide opportunities for exchanging different ideas and perspectives on the same topic, there are also some fundamental challenges such as the difficulty to find a common language to efficiently work together. That is because the different stakeholders who need to interact have their own sets of definitions and operational frameworks. Nevertheless, when passionate people are brought together, progress can be achieved. A big role in driving this positive change is also with third sector organisations and notable examples of groups involved in creating dialog are the Digital Medicine (DiMe) Society, the Digital Therapeutics Alliance, Node.Health or the HealthXL.

The role of national governments

Whether a country has a public or private healthcare system, the role of the government is without any doubt of critical importance.
Starting from the “classical” prescription drugs model, a lot can be done to favour the adoption of digital health solutions to the benefit of patients first, then also the overall economy.

For example, Denmark has already developed an infrastructure to securely store health data, which is protected by the government; while Estonia has invested in blockchain technology to secure the centralized health data the country has collected over the last several years and will continue to do so.

The UK and Germany are other well-known examples. The former successfully trialled a telehealth system in 2017, while the latter has recently given doctors permission to prescribe health apps as part of a treatment regime to all insured patients, starting in 2020.

Another example of a positive effort to implement digital health has been made by Sweden, which provides adults with access to their health-related data, including illness and treatments, in addition to allowing them to send secure messages to hospitals. This is definitely a strong example of how everyone can be empowered, informed and educated about their health and everything suggests it will become even more critical when data from genome-based personalized medicine becomes available.

The Innovation Forum network against COVID-19: the VentilAid project

There is no doubt that the current pandemic is challenging individuals and communities worldwide with unforeseen problems, whether they are directly related to people’s health or not. As history tells us, when humans face a common enemy, the solidarity and sense of belonging to a single race are unbelievable. We are putting aside our differences, our beliefs and overcoming geographical distances to provide help to the ones in need.

A great example is VentilAid, a project born in Kracow, where a few members of the company Urbicum had the idea to use their 3D-printing technology to manufacture ventilators more easily and cheaply. 

Since the initial product idea, many people from all over the world have volunteered to join the crew and the team is now working to release their prototype III. Thanks to their wide network of collaborators and volunteers, they are also developing other important products, such as protective face masks.

VentilAid’s Project Manager, Szymon Chrupczalski

 

Here is an extract of their most recent press release, curated by
Dr Lukasz Szydlowski, a member of the VentilAid team as well as President & Co-Founder of the Innovation Forum branch in Okinawa, Japan:

Over the course of two weeks, starting with only a few people focused around the “last chance ventilator” project, VentilAid has transformed into an international operation.

“Emails from all over the world are reaching us with thanks and words of encouragement. It warms our hearts when reading a letter from an engineer from Brazil, that our solutions have become a light at the end of a long dark tunnel for him”, comments Szymon Chrupczalski, the project manager.

Shortly after announcing the ventilator project, many specialists got in touch: doctors, engineers, technicians and entrepreneurs with offers of substantive and financial assistance.

Thanks to their support, it has been possible to significantly improve the projects, as well as to launch important accompanying projects, including:

  • Simple and durable adapters for scuba diving masks
  • Protective face masks
  • Oxygen concentrators
  • A few other solutions, which will be announced shortly

Also, strategic decisions regarding the projects which we have already commenced are as follows:

Prototypes 1 and 2 with which we initially began our campaign have been abandoned, however, we are now completely focused on prototype 3. Documentation for Prototypes 1 and 2 shall continue to be available in Open Source Format as last chance ventilators.

Detail of the innovative 3D-printed ventilator developed by the Polish team.

 

What is the new VentilAid prototype going to be?

The VentilAid prototype 3 is going to be a device used for non-invasive ventilation, working in CPAP and BiPAP modes with an oxygen feeder. It will enable a patient to remain stable or to improve the condition of a conscious patient who does not qualify for intubation and to be connected to a professional ventilator. It will also free up medical staff, who will be able to transfer expensive equipment to patients in the most critical conditions.

The new VentilAid will be a solution based on suggestions and requests by doctors who report that precisely this type of device is most needed in the process of treating COVID-19.

It is definitely a more complicated device than the previously publicly available prototype 1, however, it fulfils the requirements of current medical standards. We have implemented a few bespoke solutions, such as a turbine that we designed ourselves, which if necessary can be printed on a 3D printer, or an oxygen feeder container without the need to use costly sensors.

The creators have also started a fundraising campaign, with the aim of financing further projects, the certification project and to prepare extensive assistance to developing countries.

At the moment thanks to people’s generosity, we’ve been able to purchase essential components which can be fitted into the new VentilAid devices. To add to that, a few tools for testing purposes and the rest from our own resources. We’d like to thank the Polish National Foundation who have also contributed to the project.

“We aim for the cost of the production of the new respiratory assistance device to not exceed 1000 PLN (200€/$240), regardless of its more complex build and required alarm sensors”, insists Chrupczalski.

The situation in Poland isn’t ever expected to be critical, but VentilAid may be a reserve device should the darkest hour ever fall upon us. Our devices may be especially helpful to countries, where there is a lack of well-equipped hospitals. COVID-19 is a very serious infection of the lungs. Those without any respiratory assistance might, without swift intervention, choke to death.

The creators of the project encourage Poles and the international community to support us in accomplishing this mission and to keep up with updates about the project through our official channels: 

https://www.ventilaid.org/

https://www.facebook.com/ventilaid/

https://twitter.com/AidVentil

Who supports VentilAid

Urbicum
MxM Production House
NeuronPR 
MaxHart
IMRStudio
Maruta Legal Advisors
GWW Legal Advisors
InPost
Łukasiewicz Research Network
Polish National Foundation
Brand24
Wirtualna Polska

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