TandemLife Set to Simplify Life Support

TandemLife announced the commercial release of its TandemLife Priming Tray, a new product designed to simplify and speed up the process of putting critically-ill patients on extracorporeal life support, providing healthcare professionals with a vital window of opportunity to accurately assess a patient’s condition and provide appropriate care.
 
More than 500,000 Americans need emergent cardiac support each year, but fewer than 2 percent receive care with advanced extracorporeal life support (ECLS). Historically, ECLS has only been available for use within the operating rooms and intensive care units of large medical centers, due to the complexity of initiating this form of life support. TandemLife has the potential to change this paradigm by combining its TandemHeart pump and TandemLung oxygenator into a single, pre-connected packaging solution that also serves as a priming basin for the system. These medical devices are capable of assisting in the circulation and oxygenation of blood for a patient with compromised cardiac or respiratory function, and with the new TandemLife Priming Tray they can be deployed in just a few minutes, rather than up to an hour with existing technology. As a result, TandemLife could bring a high level of circulatory support capability to hospitals nationwide, regardless of their location, size or current treatment algorithm.
 
“In 2012 our team committed to an extremely aggressive program; developing and launching eight new medical devices in four years,” said John Marous, president and CEO of TandemLife. “The TandemLife product line is our most important program to date because of its potential to create a much needed paradigm shift in emergent cardiac care. With the addition of the TandemLife Priming Tray, our system can be deployed in five minutes or less, providing both physicians and patients with the most valuable resource of all: more time.”
 
The priming tray is designed to provide hospitals with a simple, repeatable priming process that can be implemented quickly wherever cardiopulmonary support is needed.
 
TandemLife is a privately-held medical device company headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pa., focused on the design, development and delivery of life support solutions.