PPF donates 50 CoroVent lung ventilators to the Ministry of Health for Czech hospitals

In early April 2020, PPF provided financial support to MICo Medical, a Czech company that develops and manufactures CoroVent lung ventilators based on its initial development at the Czech Technical University (ČVUT) and in cooperation with the COVID19CZ platform. The ventilators have obtained authorisation for use from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and will soon receive authorisation in the Czech Republic, so that they can be used in Czech hospitals.

Vladimír Mlynář, Chief of Public Affairs at PPF and trustee of the PPF Foundation, said: “The PPF Foundation has been a part of the CoroVent project since the very beginning. Our involvement is around providing emergency use instrumentation should the number of hospital patients rise. This is also our way of thanking the team of Czech researchers involved in the ventilator’s development and the Czech manufacturer that was courageous enough to invest its own funds in the project.”

The Ministry of Health will distribute the 50 CoroVent lung ventilators to major university hospitals, who have already set out their requirements. Všeobecná fakultní nemocnice (General University Hospital) in Prague, Thomayerova nemocnice (the Thomayer Hospital in Prague), FN Motol (the Motol University Hospital in Prague), and FN Plzeň (the University Hospital in Plzeň) will each receive ten units; the University Hospital in Hradec Králové and the Královské Vinohrady University Hospital in Prague will each receive five units.

CoroVent ventilators

A team of specialists at ČVUT’s Faculty of Biomedical Engineering, led by Professor Karel Roubík who has been researching artificial pulmonary ventilation for more than 25 years, developed the CoroVent lung ventilator on the COVID19CZ platform.

This unique lung ventilator first came to prominence in March of this year, when more than CZK 15 million was raised in record time through crowdfunding in the Czech Republic.

Subsequently, Třebíč-based MICo Medical accepted the ventilator for manufacture when the documentation was released under a time-limited open source hardware licence, which provided manufacturing opportunities to other entities as well.