Procter & Gamble Co. provided a seed grant to help create Venti-Now, a Blue Ash nonprofit launched in late March that has just received FDA approval to make a portable and affordable ventilator to help Covid-19 patients. The goal is to license the design for manufacture around the world.
John Molander, 63, president of Venti-Now, retired from P&G in 2013 after nearly 34 years with the Cincinnati-based maker of consumer goods such as Charmin toilet paper (NYSE: PG).
The Montgomery resident assembled a team of 30 volunteers, about half of whom are P&G alums, to form the company and design, build and test the initial product in three weeks. He was inspired to launch Venti-Now after one of his sisters who is an emergency medicine physician, Dr. Karin Molander of California, told him of the urgent need for ventilators.
“There are still hot spots,” John Molander told me. “This is wave one. The models tell us there will likely be three waves. … In the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, the second wave was the fatal one. … The first wave was the canary in the coal mine.”
The Venti-Now team has been helped by current P&G experts across research & development, engineering and supply chain.
“P&G has that expertise in house because they make medical devices for Oral-B and other products like that,” Molander told me.
His last seven years as a mechanical engineer with P&G, Molander was a technology scout responsible for looking for new products, processes, materials and ideas for consumer products. He spent two years working for Kathy Fish, P&G’s chief research, development and innovation officer.
“John and I worked together at P&G before he retired, so I had experienced firsthand his ingenuity and passion for excellence,” Fish said in a statement issued by P&G. “It was clear that extended across John’s team, the design and in the tremendous opportunity for Venti-Now to meet a critical need. It’s been incredibly inspiring to see the best of P&G past and present come together for one common mission – to save lives.”
Venti-Now’s chief operating officer and licensing team leader is Mark Peterson, who retired as P&G’s director of global business development in 2016. Sales team leader is Dan Peterson, former global sales leader of the P&G Oral Care category. Bill Wise, another P&G alum, is the manufacturing and supply chain team leader for Venti-Now.
The design/engineering team leader is Art Koehler, a former P&G principal investigator for cooperative research with the University of Cincinnati and other institutions.
The prototype unit was further developed with input from doctors and nurses at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. Dr. Peter Campbell, a professor of biomedical engineering at UC who guides students in the development of medical device projects, is medical team leader of Venti-Now.
P&G declined to disclose the amount it contributed to help launch Venti-Now. Molander said he’s raised a total of about $200,000 from numerous sources as well as significant donations in kind.
For example, YourEncore, a firm that hires former Procter & Gamble employees to serve as consultants for other companies, is donating office space and IT support in Blue Ash. Brad Lawson, who founded YourEncore in 2003, is the funding team leader for Venti-Now and working with various philanthropic and nonprofit organizations to secure capital to launch the manufacturing and scale-up of the Venti-Now Emergency Ventilator.
Molander expects that the Venti-Now design could sell for less than $4,000 per unit, and he’s in discussions with what he described as two major philanthropies that have expressed an interest in helping cover the cost of providing the ventilators to countries in need.
Venti-Now is in discussions with several manufacturers about partnering to get the device to market quickly, and the nonprofit is working with state agencies to direct units to areas where they are needed most.
PMC Smart Solutions of Blue Ash is manufacturing the first 20 units, which should roll out in the next 10 days or so and will undergo additional testing, Molander said. He wants to partner with several manufacturers that could each make at least 1,000 units a week.
“Our biggest interest from a business standpoint is finding a licensing partner,” he said. “We’re like a design house, where we’ve got really solid design and engineering and systems work. What we can deliver to a partner is we’ve laid out a production system. … We’ like to find a manufacturing partner with the finances and production management experience to get those made and distributed into both FEMA and the state agencies.”
Venti-Now received FDA Emergency Use Authorization to create the electro-pneumatic ventilator to provide oxygen-enriched air to patients in the early stages of acute respiratory distress syndrome related to Covid-19.
Described as a constant volume emergency ventilator system, the device was designed to free up scarce full-feature ventilators as well as increase availability in areas where high-end equipment might be unavailable.
“It’s a nice, clean, durable design with intuitive control systems,” Molander said. “We think it could be beneficial in the developing world, where you don’t want to bring in systems with complex microprocessors. You want a durability factor and intuitiveness.”
Molander said the global demand for such ventilators is going to far outstrip the needs in the U.S.
“Right now, if you look at the rapid rise of Covid-19 going on in Russia, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador – all of them are going up a steep climb,” he said. “And countries in Africa are just now being exposed and haven’t started that climb yet.
“That’s what keeps me awake at night,” he said.
2018 fiscal year revenue
| Rank | Prior Rank | Business name (*not previously ranked) |
|---|---|---|
1 | 1 | Kroger Co. |
2 | 2 | Procter & Gamble Co. |
3 | 3 | Macy's Inc. |