Medical Device Entrepreneur Designs Emergency Ventilator, At $10,000 Price Point, To Battle Coronavirus

Medical device entrepreneur Darren Saravis was awake at 4 a.m. one night recently worrying about what he could do to help in the fight against coronavirus. The CEO of Long Beach medical-device engineering firm Nectar, Saravis decided to start a new firm, called BreathDirect, to make a cheaper, simpler ventilator that could help address the acute shortage of ventilators in the United States. “We designed a ventilator that has the minimum specs to treat COVID-19 clinically using all locally-sourced parts,” says Saravis, who has developed more than 1,000 medical products over the past 25 years. “That was the big pivot.”

The new emergency device, which will need to receive approval from the Food and Drug Administration, is slated to cost $10,000, compared to the $20,000 price tag for a full-featured ventilator. Saravis says that he expects to be able to mass produce it at a rate of 3,500 per week in May and 40,000 per month by June.

While the slimmed-down device won’t be as fancy as sophisticated ventilators now on the market from Medtronic, Drager, Philips and others, Saravis says that he believes it can handle the needs of about 90% of critically ill COVID-19 patients. To design the new ventilator, Saravis brought on Jeff Orth, chief technology officer of Bunnell, which makes high-frequency ventilators for infants, as his chief scientific advisor. The design follows the guidelines of the U.K. Department of Health and Social Care for a rapidly manufactured ventilator system.

“It’s a fully functional ventilator—It just doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles,” says Orth, who has worked for Bunnell for 25 years. “It’s kind of old-school, and based on available components. Rather than taking the time to generate a touch screen and a big display, we are using knobs because we can get them.”

With coronavirus spreading and U.S. cases of COVID-19 now above 100,000, states have been scrambling to get ventilators. In New York, the hardest hit state to date, for example, Governor Andrew Cuomo has said that he expects to need 30,000 ventilators, far above the supply on hand. Meanwhile, President Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to require General Motors to make ventilators after the automaker said that it was moving forward with its plans with Ventec Life Systems to make them.

As for Saravis’s solution, it won’t be ready in time to to address the expected needs for ventilators in April, despite working round the clock. “Instead of taking a year or two, we’re taking a week or two,” he says. “We’ve been hearing requests from people, ‘Can you please send it sooner.’ It looks to me we are going to be the fastest solution to get this many vents out there.”