Grant: Project Grant

Respiratory failure is the major cause of morbidity among low birth weight neonates. Mechanical ventilation has dramatically improved outcome in this condition but can have side-effects that lead to long-term impairment. Over the past few years we have developed a new approach known as the artificial placenta - a device that mimics the natural circulation before birth where the fetus obtains oxygen from the mother. The device is elegantly designed so that it can operate in a pumpless manner, much like the natural placenta. It is designed to use the baby's own heart to perfuse a significant fraction of the blood volume through a microfluidic extracorporeal device and exchange oxygen with the external ambient environment. Being a passive device, it does not require external pumps and has a small internal volume which eliminates the need for external blood transfusion when it is connected to the neonate. We have developed a series of devices with increasing capabilities and are at a stage where initial animal experiments on piglets with the same weight as human neonatal babies have shown that our devices can sustain them even when under respiratory distress like conditions. These initial experiments show the promise of our approach, but further experiments are needed to conclusively validate that they would be suitable to support the piglets over typical operational lifetime of this device (~ 3-4 days). Further research is also needed to confirm whether the internal coating that we provide to the device is active over the intended operational lifetime. In addition to the validation of the device using animal models, we will also simplify the manufacturing process for the device and evaluate new coating technologies to ensure highest reliability of the device operation as well as its manufacturing. The validation of the technology obtained in this project on animal models will be critical to move it to the next stage of human clinical trials.