Xerox Will Mass Produce Disposable Ventilators In Partnership With Vortran To Fight Coronavirus

Xerox will mass-produce disposable ventilators in partnership with Vortran Medical Technology in the fight against coronavirus.

The copier giant plans to help Vortran, a small medical-device manufacturer, scale production of its GO2Vent ventilator and related airway pressure monitor, APM-Plus, from approximately 15,000 before the crisis and 40,000 ventilators in April to between 150,000 and 200,000 a month by June. Their goal is to eventually produce as many as 1 million of these ventilators for both the U.S. and global markets.

The GO2Vent, which is disposable and costs approximately $120, is not a replacement for ventilators used in ICUs for the most critically ill patients, but rather a device that can be used for lower- and medium-risk patients to free up those devices for the patients who most need them. The device is gas-operated and can be operated on a compressor, oxygen or air for up to 30 days.

“It is very simple in terms of design and use at emergency response centers and in hospital settings, and it can be manufactured at hyper-scale,” Xerox chief technology officer Naresh Shanker told Forbes.

Shanker said that Xerox CEO John Visentin had pulled together a team of scientists, researchers and engineers in March to figure out how the company could help during the coronavirus crisis. So when Vortran reached out looking to scale up its production, Shanker said, it was a good fit.

Xerox plans to manufacture the devices at its factory outside of Rochester, N.Y., where the company was founded. Vortran will continue to make the ventilators at its facility in Sacramento, California. “We are mobilizing a team to scale out the production lines,” Shanker said. “We are in the process of sorting out materials, ramping up the labor, molding and tooling. We are ramping up everything.”

The partnership is just the latest corporate effort to temporarily up to crank up production to solve the ventilator shortage, following earlier partnerships by Ford and GE Healthcare, and by General Motors and Ventec.

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