A Victoria company has received Health Canada certification for life-saving ventilators it designed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
StarFish Medical said federal approval allows the manufacturer to start production and ship units to the public health authority’s emergency stockpile immediately. Officials will begin testing the devices and assign them to hospitals in need across the country.
Ventilators are critical to keeping alive those most seriously infected with the virus, and the timing is key, as health officials brace for a wave of new cases over the winter months.
Since March, Starfish Medical has been racing to redesign the technology developed by Dr. Magdy Younes, a Winnipeg respiratory specialist and innovator. The original Winnipeg Ventilator was licensed and used as the basis for commercial ventilators for decades, including during the 2003 SARS epidemic.
StarFish has an order from the Canadian government for up to 7,500 of the re-designed ventilators. StarFish is one of three companies tasked with producing up to 30,000 units over the next year.
“Our goal with the Winnipeg Ventilator 2.0 is to deliver a fully featured ICU ventilator that could save patients’ lives, be manufactured in Canada in the shortest time possible, and not disrupt the supply chain for existing ventilators,” StarFish Medical CEO and founder Scott Phillips said in a statement.
“To do that, we started with proven technology, updated the design to incorporate technical advances and use non-medical supplier components, all while drawing upon a network of companies we have worked with for over 20 years.”
John Walmsley, StarFish Medical vice-president, noted the importance of teamwork in the project’s rapid progress. “Our supply chain moved quickly and diligently to discover what supplies and services were available, while our engineers worked with available components to create and build the design,” he said.
Walmsley said all 106 of StarFish Medical’s Victoria employees have been involved in the project. The company also has 30 working at a Toronto office.
Another 100 people are involved at key vendors, including Dometic, Advanced Test Automation, Yorkville, Dorigo Systems, Powersonic Industries and EM Dynamics.
StarFish said it presented its new ventilator design to expert review panels and received positive feedback, including from Younes, who tested the updated version of his ventilator and called it a “masterpiece.”
After designing the ventilator, StarFish brought on board Celestica, a Toronto-based electronics manufacturing services company, to co-ordinate the supply chain and its vendor network for manufacturing.
Kevin Walsh, vice-president for Celestica, said in a statement that as soon as the company received the StarFish design, it began to source critical parts so it could start production of 7,500 units. “These ventilators are essential to treating critically-ill COVID-19 patients, so speeding time-to-market has never been more critical,” he said.
An interim order by the federal government allows the sale of medical devices that do not fully comply with Canadian requirements, but are manufactured according to comparable standards.
In a statement this week, Navdeep Bains, federal minister of innovation, science and industry, said Starfish “stepped up early on” with a commitment to produce made-in-Canada important lifesaving equipment.
