China's 'artificial lung' with independent intellectual property rights comes on market

China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation and Peking Union Medical College Hospital jointly announced on Wednesday that their new “artificial lung” with fully independent intellectual property rights has come onto the market in Beijing.

Their ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation) system is also commonly known as an “artificial lung.” The ECMO machine is similar to a heart-lung bypass machine used in open-heart surgery. It pumps and oxygenates a patient's blood from outside the body, allowing the heart and lungs to rest.

The whole machine, called Huisheng-I ECMO, weighs about 7.5 kilograms, less than half the weight of similar foreign products, so it can better meet the emergency and transport needs of critically ill patients.

ECMO is an important part of life support for patients, as well as an important treatment means to gain time for them. However, the technical threshold is high, as is the price, and the key core technologies have previously been monopolized by a few multinational medical device enterprises.

The development of China’s ECMO system has broken the monopoly of foreign enterprises, improved the access to advanced life support equipment in China, and significantly reduced the price of the product, which is conducive to reducing the burden of medical treatment for patients.

“The technology of the product is independent and controllable, with completely independent intellectual property rights,” Zeng Si, the director of the ECMO research project, said on Wednesday. “The overall performance and indicators reach the level of similar international products; some indicators are even better than similar products,” Zeng noted.

The core technology of the ECMO system is derived from a rocket servo system, Zeng said. The servo system is made up of many components, involving mechanical, electronic, fluid and other items, and because it works in a small space, it has to be highly integrated and lightweight.

Du Bin, deputy commander of the ECMO project and vice president of Peking Union Medical College Hospital, said that when the ECMO project was established in 2020, the hospital joined the technical team, which was mainly responsible for the design and implementation of animal experiments and clinical trials.

In the early stage of research, the hospital led clinical colleagues to put forward clinical needs, benchmarked foreign products and put forward suggestions on product model details.

In the animal experiment stage, the hospital took the lead in designing and establishing long-term ECMO supporting animal models in cooperation with sibling units, which realized long-term operation of more than 14 days.

The successful development of Huisheng-I ECMO is the result of collaborative innovation between the medical and technological industry, experts said.