Lungpacer Medical: From university invention to lifesaving innovation

Lungpacer Medical, a Canadian innovation success story, began as a labour of love for both its inventor and its first major business partner.

Simon Fraser University (SFU) biomedical physiology and kinesiology professor and neuroscientist-inventor Andy Hoffer had already co-founded two biotechnical companies (Neurostream Technologies in 1998 and Bionic Power in 2006), when he was presented with his next challenge.

In December 2006, his mother developed pneumonia and was rushed to intensive care, where she was connected to a mechanical ventilator. Hoffer flew home to Uruguay to be with her and during the next five weeks, he watched anxiously as she made daily, unsuccessful efforts to breathe independently. The tragedy led him to conceive of a way to help patients, like his mother, breathe on their own again.

He suspected that placing patients on mechanical ventilation must significantly weaken their diaphragm—the primary muscle responsible for breathing, and this made it difficult or impossible to breathe when removed from the ventilator.

Noticing that intensive care patients require intravenous catheters to administer fluids and medication, he realized that a catheter placed in a large vein in the upper chest should course very near the two phrenic nerves that control the diaphragm muscle.

He came up with the idea of attaching electrodes to the surface of an intravenous catheter to electrically stimulate the diaphragm while patients are on ventilators, thus keeping the muscle from atrophying and remain strong until they need to breathe independently again.

Upon returning to Canada, Hoffer filed a provisional U.S. patent within three weeks and proceeded to assemble a new research team with seven graduate and undergraduate students.

To support the commercial potential of this invention, the SFU Innovation Office awarded development funds to build and test prototypes in anesthetized pigs. In 2009, SFU partnered with Hoffer to create a spinoff company, Lungpacer Medical.

Hoffer obtained substantial grant funding for the new company from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the National Research Council of Canada Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC-IRAP), and earned several industry awards. The company also received initial private investment from 31 friends and colleagues.

Hoffer was granted his first 13 global patents in 2013 and to date, over 150 global patents have been granted to Lungpacer, with Hoffer as the sole inventor or a co-inventor in 104 of these.

He served as Lungpacer’s chief scientific officer for the first seven years, with expert business mentoring and financial management provided by Ian Hand, then associate director of the SFU Innovation Office.

Company operations were carried out within the SFU Neurokinesiology Laboratory until 2014, when the growing Lungpacer team required larger premises. It was time to hire full-time seasoned management, seek substantial investment, and move the young company to its own off-campus site.  

By then the invention had caught the eye of Philadelphia-based technology entrepreneur Doug Evans, who was looking for new opportunities. Evans’ son Cameron had tragically passed away at just 12 years old, within weeks of being weaned from a ventilator. The experience of watching his son struggle to regain his breathing motivated Evans to join Lungpacer as CEO in 2014 and he continues to lead the company to this day.

Together, Hoffer, Hand and Evans secured two rounds of venture funding and moved the company to a new space in Burnaby, just down the hill from SFU, where they installed a large clean room for manufacturing implantable-grade devices.

The first human feasibility trials began in 2015, and over the next several years the Lungpacer team worked to establish clinical trials in dozens of hospitals in Europe and the U.S. 

Over its first eight years, the company trained and employed dozens of SFU students and researchers. Nine students completed master or doctoral theses on topics related to Lungpacer technology development or clinical testing, 17 engineers and biomedical scientists were employed full-time and 27 students completed research projects or co-op terms.

In 2017, Lungpacer moved its operations to Philadelphia, yet it remains a Canadian company headquartered in Vancouver. During the global pandemic in 2020, Lungpacer received U.S. FDA approval for emergency use of its experimental technology to support patients with COVID-19. That same year, the first COVID-19 patient in Germany was treated with diaphragm strengthening therapy and successfully weaned from the ventilator.

The most important milestone towards eventual commercialization was met in December 2024. Lungpacer’s AeroPace® System received premarket approval from the FDA in the U.S, on the basis of positive results from their clinical trial, RESCUE3, involving 223 patients across 48 centers in the U.S. and Europe.

The trial demonstrated high ventilator weaning success, with paced patients needing to spend an average of three fewer days on ventilators than the unpaced control group. Paced patients also experienced fewer complications and a 50 per cent improvement of diaphragm strength. The pacing protocol was deemed safe and well-tolerated.

A second Lungpacer product is currently also in clinical trials and continues to achieve milestones.

The Lungpacer story demonstrates the long timelines and significant investments required to bring scientific inventions and discoveries to the point of commercialization. It also illustrates what can be achieved when university innovation is supported along its journey.