Skolkovo resident biomed company Aelita has put a new anesthetic machine through five months of successful testing on real patients, passing a key test on the path to market entry.
The machine, known as Anekom, is intended for inhalation anesthesia in combination with controlled and assisted ventilation, and was used 24 times on surgical patients from May through September, the company told sk.ru.
Aelita's anesthetic machine, Anekom
The operations were carried out at the B. V. Petrovsky Russian Scientific Surgery Center in Moscow and mainly involved lung and vascular surgery.
“The big advantage of this machine over traditional equipment is the injection method of analgesic dosage, which significantly lowers the amount spent on expensive anesthetic drugs, as well as increasing the dosage accuracy,” wrote doctors Valery Sandrikov and Viktor Mizikov in joint remarks.
Anesthetic machines are used in many types of surgery. They keep a patient unconscious through a constant flow of oxygen mixed with anesthetic agents from the machine to the mouth via a tube and mask.
The Aelita model employs innovative new technology in formulating the breathing gas. Traditional machines vaporize the anesthetic agents before sending them into the gas flow. But Anekom injects the required amount of liquid anesthetic directly into the gas stream.
It combines this with ultramodern touchscreen technology and a more compact corpus that saves valuable space in the operating theater.
Aelita's Olga Andreeva praised the trials as granting the company “powerful, solid and fundamentally strong prospects of further development.”
The Nizhny Novgorod-based firm won the InBioMed 2014 competition at the Skolkovo Startup Village in June.
*An earlier version of this article erroneously identified the company as Anekom, and the product as Aelita.