Thank you very much for this opportunity to testify.
My story today is about a team of talented Canadian scientists and engineers working with international collaborators and Canadian industry who were inspired by the opportunity to apply their skills to make a difference in the COVID-19 pandemic.
When confronted by a daunting world situation, we all ask ourselves, “What can I possibly do to help?” I personally was presented with just such an opportunity back in March when I was contacted by my colleague, Professor Cristiano Galbiati in Milan, Italy, in the midst of the worst region for COVID-19 at the time, who said, “I think that we can use the skills that we have developed for our experimental search for dark matter particles to build ventilators and save lives.”
It was apparent to me that our skills in gas handling for the large liquid argon baths used in our underground experiments at SNOLAB and, in the future, in Italy, could be directed in this way if we could build a diverse and dedicated team to work on the project. I immediately called the directors of Canadian national labs, who are with us today: TRIUMF in Vancouver, where researchers were already collaborating on our dark matter research; Canadian Nuclear Laboratories, Chalk River, where I knew that there were very skilled engineers working on nuclear reactors and their safety systems; SNOLAB, our world leading underground laboratory in Sudbury; and the McDonald Institute, a Canada First Research Excellence Fund project with skilled scientists at universities across the country. I received an immediate positive response from the lab directors and an equally positive response from the scientists and engineers, who proceeded to work night and day, seven days a week, to create a straightforward, easy-to-construct and relatively inexpensive ventilator.
Our international team, led by Professor Galbiati, including INFN in Italy and Fermilab in the United States, created a working model on the benchtop in about 10 days and took it to a hospital in Monza for testing on a human breathing simulator. Our simplified ventilator requires fewer than 40 parts, as compared to traditional ventilators that can require over 1,000 parts. We received immediate and very valuable feedback from doctors in Italy, Canada and the United States on how to improve the design and meet the requirements for safety necessary for patient use.
We immediately began working with an Italian manufacturer, Elemaster, on industrializing the design, and with a Canadian partner company, Vexos, in Markham, and their sub-contractor, JMP Solutions in London, Ontario, to optimize the manufacturability and reliability of the device.
The ventilator concept is simple. You wish to deliver oxygen-enriched air to a patient in a careful, regulated way. This is done by an inhalation valve and an exhalation valve that are opened and closed sequentially with precise control of the pressure and timing of the cycle. Our device accomplishes this with the valves controlled by readily available, programmable microcomputers and interactive display units, which are very familiar to our scientists and engineers for their normal work.
Of course, in practice, ventilator design becomes more complicated. You must make the device safe in all conceivable situations, so many safety valves and other auxiliary equipment must be added. The programming must make sure to meet all the patient's needs and be easily displayed and controlled by doctors and respiratory technicians. In this, we were greatly helped by the skills of our electronics and programming specialists at TRIUMF and our mechanical engineers and safety experts at Chalk River working with our international team—from home, in most cases.
Of course, our team is very used to collaborating via the web. You may remember that the World Wide Web was actually invented by a particle physicist working at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, to enable effective communication and collaboration with his colleagues. We have used the Internet daily in our collaborations for many years.
So our team produced a ventilator, which we called the Mechanical Ventilator Milano, MVM, tested it extensively, and received United States Food and Drug Administration's emergency use authorization in about six weeks—quite a remarkable achievement.
Our Canadian model, as manufactured by Vexos and JMP, must receive Health Canada authorization before deployment here to ensure that any small part differences from the Italian base model due to supply chain availability will have no significant adverse effects. We're confident that we will meet the Health Canada requirements, because many of these requirements are very similar to those that passed testing for the U.S. FDA authorization.
From the beginning, we as scientists have taken an open licence approach to our work, publishing scientific papers on the basic design and testing as the design progresses. Our open presentations are similar to what one would present for a patent application, but we will not seek a patent. Rather, we're making the information available under an open licence for maximum international value in our current crisis situation. Our Canadian and international companies have put a lot of effort into translating this design into an industrialized product and obtaining medical authorization, and that would also be necessary for companies picking up this design in any other country.
We have benefited greatly by strong assistance from ISED and Health Canada. Following their initial review of our project, they issued a letter of intent to Vexos that inspired them to devote resources to the development work, which has now culminated in a signed contract with the federal government for 10,000 of these ventilators. The ventilators will be supplied starting at the end of June, ramping up to a rate of over 800 a week shortly thereafter.
We are also very grateful for donations from philanthropists, including the Donald R. Sobey Foundation, the Lazaridis Family Foundation, Josh Felker and a number of other donors who have made it possible for us to meet a number of research needs during this work and to achieve our design within a short time window.
We're very proud of the way that Canadian scientists, engineers, national labs and manufacturers have come together so effectively for this humanitarian effort. I'm continually amazed at the skill and dedication of members of our team in their work on our project. It's clear that Canada’s continued investment in national laboratories and universities has created tremendous expertise in science, engineering and leading-edge manufacturing. Our strengths in all—