According to Dr. Keith Lurie, chairman and chief medical officer of Eden Prairie–based Advanced Circulatory Systems, about 1,000 Americans each day who are not already in a hospital experience cardiac arrest—the failure of the heart to contract and pump blood out of its chambers. (It’s typically caused by a heart attack or heart disease.) Only 5 percent of those patients survive their hospital stay. What’s more, Lurie adds, only 18 percent of in-hospital cardiac arrest patients live to be discharged.
Improving patients’ chances for survival is the opportunity that Lurie, who’s also a professor of internal medicine and emergency medicine at the University of Minnesota, saw in developing the ResQPod with a U of M colleague, Mike Sweeney. Introduced to the marketplace in 2005 after FDA approval, the ResQPod is a single-use, one-way valve—about the size of a child’s fist—that fits onto any air mask or breathing tube. It’s used in conjunction with cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), which Lurie describes as an “inherently inefficient” process that on its own delivers only 10 to 20 percent of normal blood flow to the heart and 25 percent of normal blood flow to the brain. The ResQPod’s built-in timer blinks to signal the moment to apply ventilation (the forcing of air into the lungs). When ventilation and chest compressions are timed and executed correctly, more negative pressure collects in the patient’s lungs, creating a vacuum that allows the heart to draw in and then release more blood into the body during the next compression.
“When you use the ResQPod on a patient who is in cardiac arrest, it instantly doubles blood flow and blood pressure, giving patients a greater chance of being resuscitated,” Lurie says.
ResQPod sales have doubled each year since the product’s release. Its primary customers are emergency medical service teams and hospital-based respiratory therapists. “By 2009, we anticipate having $25 million in sales,” Lurie says.
The ResQPod may have other applications besides cardiac-arrest resuscitation. Since its inception in 1997, Advanced Circulatory Systems has raised roughly $14 million in funding, split evenly between angel investors and grants from the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Defense. The armed services are interested in the device for treating head injury and blood loss; it is currently being used in Iraq.
