Impeller optimization for a combined pump-oxygenator

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Lung disease is America's third largest cause of death. Adult respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) afflicts approximately 150,000 patients every year in the US. Lung disease costs the American economy $148 billion yearly in total expenditures. While treatment for heart disease and cancer has been marked by a significant fall in their rates of death (36.6% for heart disease since 1979), the rates of death from lung diseases rose by 19.3% during the same time period. Current available therapies for acute and chronic lung diseases have not been effective and have various problems associated with them. The goal of this proposal is to combine our unique technical strengths in blood pump and artificial lung technologies and new computational design approaches to design and develop an innovative paracorporeal pump-oxygenator (PPO) for adult respiratory support. The innovative PRO proposed for development by this STTR proposal is based on a novel concept of a compact, integrated impeller pump and gas-exchanger that incorporates an integrated pumping and active mixing principle for excellent gas exchange and eliminates the need for the native right ventricle to be the pumping source, as in passively perfused artificial lungs. Our proposal represents a transfer of technology from the University of Maryland Artificial Organs Laboratory to MC3 Inc. with the objective of developing a compact and efficient pump-oxygenator device with the following design specifications: (1) O2 transfer of 400 ml/min; (2) blood pumping capability of up to 6 liters/min against a pressure of 100 mmHg; (3) total volume less than 50% of a passive (i.e. with out mechanical pump) artificial lung. Our target of this Phase I effort is to optimize the impeller design in order to demonstrate the feasibility and efficacy of the integrated pumping-oxygenation functions and the short-term hemocompatibility of the compact PPO device in vivo. To achieve these design specifications, we propose to address the following specific aims in this Phase I effort: 1) optimize the impeller design of the PPO for gas transfer performance and hemocompatibility; 2) fabricate PPO prototypes for performance testing; 3) conduct in-vitro hemocompatibilty experiments on the optimized PPO impeller design; and 4) conduct short-term in-vivo experiments on the optimized PPO impeller design.