Portable sedation device

A wide range of medical procedures and interventions are carried out under sedation, and in even the most difficult situations the delivery of combined anaesthesia and analgesia is mandatory for surgical procedures. Due to the lack of portable equipment or a shortage of highly trained staff, these requirements can be difficult to meet. This is particularly the case in pre-hospital medicine and in the rapidly expanding fields of sedation for painful procedures (eg gynaecological fertility treatments, dentistry). Availability of a simpler to use technology, that would allow patients to receive volatile anaesthesia/sedation in a much wider variety of places, therefore offers significant patient benefit via the possibility of pre-hospital medicine, local clinic based treatment, more rapid sedation recovery times and therefore higher patient throughput. We have developed a novel device for the delivery of well-established volatile anaesthetic drugs using a patented formulation approach. The new delivery mechanism offers considerable advantages for simplicity of control and stability of anaesthetic release. Our program of work will generate a small, lightweight portable sedation device, suitable for use in a wide range of clinical and non-clinical settings, and suitable for use by a wide range of healthcare practitioners. Our technology is designed to be particularly beneficial in the developing world, where access to advanced medical procedures is frequently limited by prohibitive costs of complex equipment, and the availability of the very highly trained staff required to use them. Developing this sedation device will provide valuable healthcare benefits in its own right, but the program of work to develop it will also generate essential safety data required to unlock future development potential for the underlying formulation-based technology. Successful entry to market via sedation for short-term medical interventions will support the scientific and economic case to broaden the range of application in sedation (eg for long-term sedation intensive care patients), and ultimately for commercial development of the parent device which was designed for induction and maintenance of anaesthesia.