Doctors from East China's Jiangsu Province deployed to Wuhan use ECMO to treat a COVID-19 patient in critical condition at Wuhan First Hospital. Photo: Cui Meng/GT

The China-made ECMO devices have been successfully applied in clinics with good effect, announced the First Affiliated Hospital of Xi'an Jiaotong University on Monday, saying this has broken the monopoly of foreign products in this medical field and achieved a breakthrough in the independent development of domestic major medical devices.

The hospital revealed the news on its official WeChat public account on Monday.

The first domestic extracorporeal membrane oxygenation equipment (ECMO), jointly developed by the hospital, Engineering Research Center for Biomaterials of Sichuan University and School of Mechanical Engineering of Xi'an Jiaotong University, was first used on Saturday and successfully treated and saved two patients with critical cardiovascular diseases, the report said.

The successful application of domestic ECMO devices in clinical practices has solved the "bottleneck" problem in the treatment of patients with critical cardiovascular diseases, the report noted.

Yan Hong, vice president of Xi'an Jiaotong University, said at the press conference on Saturday that after the ECMO devices are mass-produced and promoted in China, it is bound to save more patients' lives.

Since the outbreak of COVID-19 in early 2020, ECMO has become known to the public as a powerful weapon in saving patients with severe cardiopulmonary failure. However, its core technology has been monopolized by foreign countries for a long time, equipment and consumables are expensive. This made China develop its own domestic ECMO devices.

The cardiovascular team of the hospital has been engaged in the clinical application and related research of ECMO for more than 20 years. The team is one of the earliest units to carry out clinical work on ECMO in China, and also one of the earliest units to develop medical instruments such as membrane oxygenator and perfusion pipeline in the country.

Before the outbreak of COVID-19, the team had already completed the sample trial production of ECMO centrifugal pump equipment and the whole series of consumables, and conducted experiments on large animals for anticoagulant coatings.

In the research and development of this project, the team fully analyzed and compared the advantages and disadvantages of similar foreign products as well as the problems existing in their clinical use, and designed the ECMO devices for domestic clinical needs.

Multi-objective optimization and numerical simulation methods were adopted to obtain the optimal design scheme of centrifugal pump flow channel; the chip-control mode was adopted to ensure the precision of ECMO control and the safety of long time working; and the new bionic-coating technology was adopted to obtain better long-term circulation anticoagulant effect than similar foreign products.

The first set of domestic ECMO system is expected to significantly reduce the domestic price of ECMO products, promote the popularization of ECMO technology to grassroots hospitals, and benefit more critically ill patients, with great strategic significance and social benefits, according to the report.

Global Times