Health & Beauty

ECMO (Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation System), which has become famous because of the new crown epidemic, will finally be made in China?

Earlier this month, a company announced that it would acquire a wholly-owned German company Hemovent for a total price of no more than 123 million euros (approximately 923 million yuan). The company was founded in 2013 and is located in Aachen, Germany. It is an innovative extracorporeal life support company. Systematic medical device company. The company's main product is ECMO, and its MOBYBOX System has obtained CE certification. This product is the world's first ECMO system integrating blood pump and membrane lung.

ECMO is an emergency equipment used to assist patients with severe heart and lung failure to perform extracorporeal breathing and circulation. The principle is to draw blood out of the vein, flow through the membrane lung to oxygenate hemoglobin and remove carbon dioxide, and then infuse the gas-exchanged blood back into the patient's body. It is suitable for various causes of cardiac and respiratory arrest, acute severe heart failure and acute severe respiratory failure. During the 2020 epidemic, ECMO rescued a large number of critically recoated patients, which made it famous.

However, due to material and technical reasons, there is no ECMO equipment supplier in China, and the existing manufacturers are all foreign-funded. Among them, Maquet has a market share of about 70%, followed by Thorin and Medtronic. Based on this, after the acquisition of Hemovent, it may be expected to become the first domestic company to produce a full set of ECMO products.

Different from ordinary ECMO, Hemovent's MOBYBOX System is a portable product. It only relies on gas-powered drive, no motor, and no external power supply. It weighs less than 2 kilograms and can be carried freely in a backpack. Based on this, the application scenarios of the product can be expanded from the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) to mobile medical scenarios such as in- and out-of-hospital transport and field rescue, so that more critically ill patients can get extracorporeal life support in the first time.

The West China Securities Research Report estimates that according to the forecast that there are 1442 Class-A hospitals and 50,000 ICU beds in China, after all the Class-A hospitals are equipped with ECMO, the domestic market for ECMO is about 1.8 billion yuan per year.

In fact, in addition to external acquisitions, the company was also promoting the localization of ECMO equipment through independent research and development. According to its 2021 semi-annual report, its new generation membrane oxygenator successfully completed clinical trials with good clinical feedback and ECMO system In the design verification stage.