NASA granted licenses to three Indian companies have got licences from to manufacture Covid-19 ventilators for serios patients. These are Alpha Design Technologies, Bharat Forge and Medha Servo Drives, according to space organisation.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) developed the ventilator specifically for coronavirus patients at its Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JLP) in Southern California.
VITAL, the special ventilator has been designed by the JPL engineers in a little over a month and received ‘Emergency Use Authorization’ from the Food and Drug Administration on April 30.
According to the statement of NASA, it offers a simple, affordable option for treating critical patients while freeing up traditional ventilators for those with the most severe COVID-19 symptoms. Its flexible design means it also can be modified for use in field hospitals,
Leon Alkalai, Manager of the JPL Office of Strategic Partnerships said that the “VITAL team is very excited to see their technology licenced. Our hope is to have this technology reach across the world and provide an additional source of solutions to deal with the on-going COVID-19 crisis.”
Its design is modified which uses compressed air and can be deployed by a greater range of hospitals and was recently tested at the UCLA Simulation Center in Los Angeles. A high-fidelity lung simulator tested almost 20 different ventilator settings, representing a number of scenarios that could be seen in critically ill patients in an intensive care unit.
Dr Tisha Wang, Clinical Chief of the UCLA Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine said that “VITAL performed well in simulation testing with both precise and reproducible results,”
