Boston company aims to make 60,000 ventilators a month for coronavirus patients

Three weeks ago Tyler Mantel didn’t really know what a ventilator was.

He’s hoping the FDA let’s him show how fast a learner he is by signing off on his nonprofit’s plans for ventilator factories around the world that will be able to produce upwards of 60,000 of the desperately needed machines a month by the end of the summer.

The Ventilator Project, a Seaport-based nonprofit organization that Mantel, of Watertown Robotics, and local entrepreneur Alex Frost started on March 20, says it is finishing up plans for a much cheaper ventilator that can be mass produced to try to fill the huge shortage caused by the global COVID-19 pandemic .

“It looks more than feasible,” Mantel insisted to the Herald of his intention to begin producing thousands a month. “We can get it out quickly, and we can get it out globally.”

The ventilator’s successfully pumping air, and the team that’s quickly risen to 200 people is finishing up the machine’s controls with an eye on getting it before the U.S. Food & Drug Administration this coming week for a quick approval. If everything goes as planned, they would make 1,000 in the first month, 4,000 in the next month and then eventually 60,000 a month. They’re trying to raise $2.5 million to scale up.

“We’re creating a manufacturing plan that any plant in the world could make,” Mantel said, adding that he’s been in talks with major distributors.

The outbreak is expected to peak in Massachusetts in the coming weeks, but there’s not expected to be a vaccine for the next 12 to 18 months, so experts expect there could be further waves of the virus in the near future, especially when the weather cools off again.

This ventilator would be sold for $5,000, as compared to normal hospital ventilators, which can go for tens of thousands of dollars. The Ventilator Project says they were able to keep the price low by making this specifically for coronavirus patients, rather than being for a range of uses. They also have cut costs by using nonmedical supplies. For example, the billows come from a contraption normally used by beekeepers.

COVID-19 has swept the world in the past few months, sickening more than a million people and killing more than 58,000 worldwide. As of Friday, Massachusetts had 10,402 people sick and 192 dead of the disease, including 10 deaths and 1,366 positive tests in Boston.

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/2wfH8r2