Czech consultant, scientist produce inexpensive ventilators

Tomas Kapler was shocked by the news that hospital doctors in northern Italy had to make harrowing decisions on which COVID-19 patients get the best care.

The online business consultant had nothing to do with lung ventilators before. To see their availability became a matter of life and death and prompted him to act. "It was a disturbing feeling for me that because of a lack of equipment the doctors had to decide whether a person gets a chance to live," Kapler told The Associated Press. "That seemed so horrific to me that it was an impulse to do something."

With the pandemic spreading, the ventilators became a precious commodity. Their price was skyrocketing and so was demand that the traditional makers were unable to immediately meet.

As a member of an informal group of volunteers formed by IT companies and experts who offered to help the state fight the pandemic, he moved to action. Working around the clock, he coordinated a team of 30 who developed a fully functional ventilator, Corovent, in just days.

Time did matter. The pandemic struck Czech Republic slightly later than in western Europe but time was running out quickly with the number of infected rising.

The challenge was the components for the ventilators were in as critical short supply as the actual ventilators. Kapler had an idea, to make the ventilators out of parts found in common machines. A crowd-funding campaign ensured the necessary finances in several hours.

Kapler approached Karel Roubik, professor of Biomedical Engineering at the Czech Technical University with a request for help. Roubik didn't have to think twice about it.

"You (I) normally wouldn't like to do something useless but in this case it didn't matter at all. And if it can be be used where there are none available, it is satisfying that it can serve a purpose." he said.

Roubik was in touch with his colleagues through Skype while his post-graduate student, Vaclav Ort,  tested the new design in their lab in Kladno, west of Prague.

The hours were so long for Ort he sometimes slept on a rollaway bed in the lab. "The first five days when we were working on the principals I used to sit in the lab until three in the morning. At seven in the morning I was back at work," he said.

They had a working prototype in five days, something that would normally take a year.

Roubik said they applied a simple design that makes the machine reliable, inexpensive, easy to make in mass and operate.

That cooperation continued after MICO, a company in energy and chemistry based in Trebic, 200 kilometers (125 miles) from Kladno, offered its production capacity.

"I thought it (making the ventilators) was something I can contribute to.I didn't do anything more than those people who were making the face masks," MICO's chief executive, Jiri Denner said. "They did the maximum they could. And I did the maximum I could."

With the certification for emergency use in the EU approved, the ventilator was ready in April but not needed. The Czech Republic managed to contain the outbreak but the health systems were still struggling elsewhere in the world.

MICO has submitted a request for approval for emergency use in countries from the United States to Brazil, Russia and others. Meanwhile, a process of the EU certification for common hospital use has been under way.

Kapler said it was an overall positive experience for him even though he had to quit his job to work on the project and has been without pay for several months.

"The task was to develop a ventilator that would save lives of COVID-19 patients and would be possible to make in mass and quickly. That was what we wanted to do. Originally, we thought it would be just an emergency ventilator for the Czech Republic. Burt it later turned out that the ventilators will be needed in the entire world. And the world will need them more than the Czech Republic."

A slogan on the ventilator's box sums up their effort: "Powered by Czech heart."