Virgin Orbit has developed a new mass-producible bridge ventilator to help in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic.
Virgin Orbit has developed a new mass-producible bridge ventilator to help in the fight against the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
The Virgin Orbit team has been consulting with the Bridge Ventilator Consortium (BVC), led by the University of California Irvine (UCI) and the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin), a group formed to spawn and nurture efforts to build producible, simple ventilators to aid in the current COVID-19 crisis. Pending clearance by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Virgin Orbit aims to commence production at its Long Beach manufacturing facility in early April, sprinting to deliver units into the hands of first responders and healthcare professionals as soon as possible.
As the COVID-19 crisis worsens and the paucity of medical equipment becomes more and more clear, the Virgin Orbit team is strongly motivated to do all that we can to help. On a normal day, we’re building rockets and other equipment for space launch; we are not medical doctors nor are we usually manufacturers of medical devices. But we do have a team of incredibly innovative and agile thinkers — experts in designing, fabricating, programming, testing — who are eager to lend a hand.
Virgin Orbit is a company within the Virgin Group which provides launch services for small satellites.On January 17, 2021, their LauncherOne successfully reached orbit, and successfully deployed 10 cubesats. The company was formed in 2017 to develop the air-launched LauncherOne rocket, launched from Cosmic Girl, which had previously been a project of Virgin Galactic. Virgin Orbit has developed a new bridge ventilator that can be mass produced to help in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic. The Virgin Orbit team has been consulting with the Bridge Ventilator. Quite the same Wikipedia.
After contacting Governor Gavin Newsom last week, Virgin Orbit was directed by his office to the California Emergency Medical Services Authority (CEMSA) and put in contact with the BVC.
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The BVC is a team of doctors, medical device experts, and researchers at UCI and UT Austin, sharing ideas across a broad national and international network to share best practices and design insights and to accelerate progress on solutions to this equipment shortage. Complex, high-end, ICU-capable ventilators are sometimes the only option available for moderate cases — for people who don’t necessarily need intensive care or have partially recovered. By supplying “bridge” ventilators, the device can free up critical resources for the most ill.
Dr. Brian JF Wong, assistant chairman of otolaryngology at UCI, said: “We face a slow-motion Dunkirk, and getting ventilators out there is very important to save lives. The demand outstrips supply, so it is important the government, industry, academia, non-profits, and the community work together to identify solutions, and design and construct them as fast as possible.”
Virgin Orbit engineers have taken rapid scaling into account from the beginning of the design process, taking advantage of the most common and robust manufacturing and assembly processes. The company’s aim is to have a functioning, deployable bridge ventilator in production in early April. Virgin Orbit would continue on to rapidly scale up to mass production in its Long Beach facility, in addition to potentially activating other manufacturers as soon as the new device is reproducible and production-ready.
Dan Hart, CEO of Virgin Orbit, said: “We are all heartbroken each night as we turn on the news and see the predicament facing doctors and nurses as they heroically work to save lives. I have never seen our team working harder. Never seen ideas moving quicker from design to prototype. We are hopeful that this device can help as we all prepare for the challenges ahead.”
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Virgin Orbit Ventilators
With guidance from medical experts at the University of California-Irvine (UCI) and the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin), Virgin Orbit has developed a new mass-producible bridge ventilator to help in the fight against the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
Our device has now been authorized for use in the U.S. during the COVID-19 National Emergency. We have begun production, with the first 100 units expected to be delivered before the end of April; and we anticipate delivering hundreds of units per week going forward.
Form & Function
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Virgin Orbit Ventilator Fda Approval
The Virgin Orbit ventilator is intended to provide automated, continuous or intermittent ventilatory support for patients suffering from respiratory failure. The beauty of the device is its simplicity, making it easy to deploy in a hospital or in the field, and extremely fast and inexpensive to manufacture.
The ventilator is in essence a very simple, very reliable, mechanical device designed to automate common manual resuscitators (also known as bag valve masks, and often referred to colloquially by the proprietary name “Ambu-bag”). The system can be used to treat moderate hypoxic and/or hypercarbic respiratory failure – in most settings, this would include the majority of COVID-19 patients – freeing up existing, more sophisticated ventilators to be used on patients with the most severe symptoms.