Project description
A safe solution for infected patients
Infectious disease outbreaks are responsible for thousands of deaths globally. The travelling patterns of our modern society further increase the health, economic and security risks associated with such outbreaks. Specialised isolation units (SIU) were developed by EpiGuard,comprising a group of medical doctors who laboured to contain Ebola infection. They came up with the EpiShuttle solution after three years of research – a one-person, hard-top (polycarbonate), reusable SIU. Under the EpiShuttle 2.0 initiative, EpiGuard aims to combine modern gas disinfection technology with EpiShuttle to make their technology cost-effective and applicable for the wider global market worth billions of euros.
Objective
The Problem: An increasing number of outbreaks with infectious diseases are seen globally. Ebola has claimed at least 77 lives in DRC (Congo) so far this year and over 11 thousand people West Africa in 2014. Other recent outbreaks are the SARS-epidemic, the MERS-cases in Asia, multi-resistant tuberculosis and the pulmonary Plague epidemic in Madagascar, Zika virus in Brazil, etc. Each of these events demonstrated the large health, economic and security risks associated with infectious disease outbreaks. The travelling patterns of our modern society increases the risk of a global “catastrophe”. To handle outbreaks, the CDC highly recommends the use of specialized isolation units (SIU) to isolate and transport the infected patients. The Solution: EpiGuard was founded in 2015 by a group of medical doctors that faced the challenge of managing Ebola patients on the field. After 3 years and ~5 million EUR of capital and labour investment, the company has recently launched into EU market the EpiShuttle solution – the world-first hard-top (polycarbonate), reusable SIU, representing a leap forward against the state of the art. The EpiShuttle is a one-person SIU, providing complete protection from contagious diseases, without compromising advanced treatment and care to the patient. The Opportunity: Partnering with a world-class design and engineering team, EpiGuard wants to position EpiShuttle as the gold standard for SIUs in the emergency workflow. EpiShuttle targets a 12 Bill. EUR market opportunity worldwide. Although the response from medical professionals has been positive, to fully exploit the market potential, there is a need for combining modern gas disinfection technology with EpiShuttle to allow re-use in a cost effective manner. Further, to expand the market outside Europe, regulatory clearance in USA and China plus a larger size unit for the USA market are needed.
Fields of science
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Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-2 - SME instrument phase 2Coordinator
1634 Gamle Fredrikstad
Norway
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.