Kiwi company offers Breath of Life to world's heart victims

By Graeme Kennedy

Friday 17th May 2002

LIFESAVER: Richard McCulloch

A small business on Auckland's North Shore is poised to launch its simple family- developed invention on to the world medical markets in a move potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

McCulloch Medical managing director Richard McCulloch said a leading Europe-based multinational had this week advised him it was continuing due diligence for global licensing of his Breath of Life resuscitator and to take over manufacture, sales and global distribution of the product.

Mr McCulloch said he had also been negotiating for the past 18 months with one of the world's leading automated external defibrillator (AED) manufacturers which wanted a Breath of Life machine alongside every one of its own installations.

He has found a Philippines distributor who is dealing with the local health officials to install more than 20,000 at regional health centres and schools while in New Zealand the St John Ambulance Service has agreed to promote and distribute them through the 40,000 people a year it trains in first aid.

"Our potential customers include the US Red Cross which trained 12 million people in cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR) last year and the American Heart Foundation," Mr McCulloch said. "We want the product to be marketed through CPR classes, in first-aid kits and at AED stations - they are the key access points - and hope that everyone going to a course will walk out with one.

"They sell in New Zealand for around $60 and even if the price in the US is $US10, sales could easily be $US120 million a year. But we believe that with Europe and the rest of the world the figure will be much more than that - the potential is just massive."

Breath of Life is an easy-to-use pump and face mask which delivers air to the lungs and oxygenates the blood of a heart- attack patient. The AED provides an electric impulse to normalise heart rhythm after a victim goes into fibrillation as a result of a sudden cardiac arrest.

Thousands of AED stations are being installed around the world at airports, railway stations, sports stadiums and any area with high concentrations of people to provide immediate assistance to heart-attack victims and the Breath of Life is recognised as an essential treatment tool, he said.

Mr McCulloch and his family were in the plastics business for 17 years, making and winning design awards for microwave-safe kitchen tools until his mother, Norma, invented the freezer-pack vacuum pump and a device for removing air bubbles from waterbeds.

"The development was all done within the family," Mr McCulloch said. "But she was the driver of the developments - she is a very creative thinker."

The Breath of Life project began after Mr McCulloch gave CPR - mouth-to-mouth - to a woman who collapsed in the street in front of him in Christmas in 1989.

"She was bloodied and her teeth were broken, so it was pretty traumatic," he said. "I then looked at the resuscitators that were available and found them to be of 1950s design, extremely difficult to use effectively and very expensive.

"We sold the family businesses to provide the $800,000 we spent on research and development over two and a half years and launched Breath of Life in 1992 as the first New Zealand-developed product licensed to international standards.

"But the market was not ready for its human use as the accepted practice then was mouth-to-mouth, although more people were becoming reluctant to give that sort of assistance due to growing concerns of contracting HIV or hepatitis B from contaminated blood.

"A 1992 US survey showed 40% of people did not want to give CPR and by 1999 that figure had risen to 85% as people resisted getting up close in mouth-to-mouth.

"So we took a sideways step and went into the animal arena, first trialling the product with Massey University on calves. They were tremendously successful and it sold quite well in Australia, Europe, the UK, US, Canada, Scandinavia, Japan and Korea."

The Breath of Life was re-launched into the human market after it won the 2000 gold medal at the International Exhibition of Inventions at Geneva and attracted immediate interest from the major multinationals.

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