Biosphere corporation makes respirators to help COVID-19 patients breathe

Biosphere Corporation, the largest manufacturer of hygiene products in Ukraine, has developed a plastic bag that helps COVID-19 patients in critical condition to breathe.

The contraption is a sealed bag with a 3D-printed valve and tubes designed to be placed on patients’ heads to ensure oxygen saturation for people with respiratory failure who can hardly breathe on their own.

Called the Bubble-CPAP — meaning continuous positive airway pressure — the contraption can serve as a low-cost and non-invasive substitute for expensive artificial respiratory systems during the early stages of respiratory diseases.

The firm has already sent 2,500 of these bags to over 100 hospitals in 65 cities in Ukraine for free as a part of a charity project called Pakety Poryatunku (“rescue bags” in Ukrainian) since on April 16.

Ukraine’s largest delivery service, Nova Poshta, also got involved to deliver the kits for free.

It was the firm’s duty to help Ukrainian hospitals that cannot afford expensive respiratory systems, Biosphere CEO Andriy Zdesenko told the Kyiv Post on April 29.

“Ninety percent of the clinics in Ukraine are not equipped with respirators, but people need to be saved,” he said. “It is simple to produce and we make it for free, as the production cost is close to zero.”

Positive feedback

So far, feedback from hospitals and doctors is positive, according to Zdesenko, who said the number of orders for the bags has doubled since April 16.

Zdesenko also said that “patients’ blood saturation with oxygen increased from 65% to 98-99%, according to doctors.”

Medical doctor Sergei Dubrov, an anesthesiologist, said the helmet is safer for the medics, as “less spread of sputum implies less contamination.” It also helps contain oxygen better than regular face masks, he told the Kyiv Post on May 3.

“The concentration of oxygen is higher than with a simple mask or through the nose,” he said.

Although inexpensive and easy to use, the system greatly helps patients, medical assistant Elizaveta Shylova told the Kyiv Post on May 3.

“We get it for free, and it’s more convenient for patients. We don’t have to use sedatives or painkillers to intubate them,” Shylova said. “We avoid infections, we can talk to our patients, and we feed them without using tubes.”

It is a much-welcomed solution, as a recent story published Bloomberg on April 24 showed that patients often need time to recover from the lesions caused by the tubes placed into their tracheas during COVID-19 treatment.

Additionally, when a person is placed on a ventilator, muscles that handle their breathing start to atrophy. Tubes inside the body can also cause infections and harm the lungs long after the patient has recovered from COVID-19.

Long term studies needed

However, Zdesenko and Shylova remain cautious: The kit cannot fully replace the invasive technology widely used for critical COVID-19 patients around the world. When a patient cannot breathe at all, only a mechanical ventilator placed into the trachea can save their life.

“We need long-term research and studies on these kits… and to see if it’s adapted to patients with more severe respiratory symptoms,” Shylova said.

Dubrov echoed this statement. “They can be used for patients with COVID-19, but it absolutely does not replace mechanical ventilation,” he said, adding that medical teams from New York and Italy had opposite views on the helmet’s efficiency.

“We do video conferences with Americans, and a doctor from New York said that CPAP isn’t effective,” Dubrov said. “Italians use it (and the helmet as well) and they think that it’s somehow effective.”

He also stressed it depends on the severity of pneumonia and respiratory distress syndrome, but “it should be effective as a transitional stage between simple oxygen therapy and mechanical ventilation”.

War-time technology 

At its core, the technology isn’t new. It was designed in the mid-20th century, when hospitals were overcrowded with patients and didn’t have access to sophisticated machines, Zdesenko said. At the time, they used regular bags to help patients with severe respiratory diseases.

“It’s a war-time technology,” he said. “People forgot about this technology, but a professor (Vladimir Korsunov) from the Kharkiv Medical Academy found it and talked about it on Facebook, asking for help” on April 4.

“The regular plastic bags from department stores are not suitable for this purpose,” Korsunov said in his social media post.

Zdesenko read the post by Korsunov, who is also the head of the anesthesiology and intensive care department at Kharkiv Medical Academy, and got involved. His company has updated the long-serving invention and come out with a special odorless and non-toxic material to replace a common plastic bag.

Mass production

As Ukraine’s largest household medical and hygiene product manufacturer, Biosphere seemed like the perfect candidate for the project, as it already had the equipment to produce the bags in industrial quantities.

The firm dedicated one machine to this product in a sterile space at its plant in Dnipro. Now, the company can produce up to 9 million bags per month and is ready to manufacture as many as hospitals will require to equip them, Zdesenko said.

According to Zdesenko producing the bag itself isn’t a problem and the only component slowing down the process is the production of the valves, parts needed to link the bags to respirators.

“It takes time to do them,” Zdesenko said.

Biosphere is working together with Ultimaker Ukraine, a firm providing small-scale workshops with 3D printers, to create the valves and Kievguma to produce tubes. But the printers cannot keep up with the mass production of Biosphere.

“There’s no commercial benefit in it for Biosphere,” Zdesenko said.

Biosphere has been approached by other countries — including by Germany, Hungary, Moldova and Belarus — to develop the kits. However, exports require special documentation and patents. Even though a strategy to sell the kits abroad is underway, this is not the company’s priority, Zdesenko said.

“We are focused on providing as many (bags) as we can in Ukraine, and we will see after that about exports,” he said. “Overall, lives are being saved – and that’s the best feedback.”