[August 29, 2019: Minneapolis, MN] Sixty-year old Greg Eubanks doesn’t remember much about that day in the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.  He was walking from one gate to the next when he collapsed without warning, suffering a sudden cardiac arrest.  Bystanders saw Greg, a physically-fit succulent plant landscaper from California, collapse and alerted TSA airport officials, who quickly started to perform CPR.

The statistical odds for patients like Greg surviving sudden cardiac arrest are grim: in the US, there are about 350,000 out of hospital cardiac arrests each year, and the survival rate is 10 percent. Furthermore, Greg had suffered a type of cardiac arrest called refractory ventricular fibrillation (RVF), a complicated cardiac arrhythmia that does not typically respond to conventional CPR and multiple AED shocks.  Generally, these patients have a completely blocked main artery in the heart, and they usually do not survive.

The first responders administered shocks from a nearby automated external defibrillator device (AED) but Greg remained in cardiac arrest until airport fire rescue arrived and deployed their bundle of cardiac arrest care, including the latest technology in their arsenal – an EleGARD™ Patent Positioning Device.   Allina incorporated the EleGARD System into its bundle of care in May of this year.

“We recently added device-assisted head up CPR with the EleGARD System to our bundle of care for cardiac arrest, and clearly it’s making a difference” commented Charlie Lick, MD, an Emergency Medicine Physician and Medical Director for Allina Medical Transportation in charge of airport CPR protocols.

Once resuscitated after eight defibrillator shocks and multiple doses of adrenaline, Greg was transported to Abbott Northwestern Hospital where he was taken to the heart catheterization lab. He was found to have 100 percent blockage of his artery which was opened with a stent in an effort to save his life.

Against the odds, and thanks to the newest technologies deployed by the paramedics and other EMS personnel at the Minneapolis Airport, Greg walked out of the hospital less than a week after his cardiac arrest and returned home to his family in full health.

Greg and his family recently reunited with the TSA agents who responded to his cardiac arrest, and he is looking forward to meeting the paramedics who treated him from Allina.  “Thanks to the first responders who treated me, and to Allina’s adoption of the EleGARD System, I have a renewed lease on life. Every moment spent with my family now is a credit to the TSA personnel who started CPR, the airport paramedics, and the bundled approach with head up CPR that Dr. Lick introduced to improve outcomes after cardiac arrest.   I am fortunate that I suffered my event when and where I did, because Minneapolis-St. Paul is the only airport in the world so far to use the EleGARD System. Every airport should adopt this approach to save patients like me.”

Dr. Keith Lurie, who helped invent the EleGARD System and is a world-renown expert on resuscitative science, commented, “Bystander CPR is critical to start the resuscitation process but it is usually not, by itself, sufficient. The scientific advances we are making in the laboratory have resulted in new tools to improve survival of cardiac arrest in the field, and they are having a measurable impact.  We now more fully understand the physiology of CPR and how to substantially improve its practice. This requires a whole new approach to resuscitation embodied in the ElevatedCPR method.  We do this because cardiac arrest should be a survivable event, with the knowledge and strides forward we have made in the last decade. To talk with Greg and see the results in this one patient means the world to me.”

Founded in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 2015 by an experienced team that previously developed multiple novel resuscitation technologies currently in widespread clinical practice, AdvancedCPR Solutions is an early stage medical device firm focused on the development and commercialization of delivery mechanisms, methods and devices that enable the ElevatedCPR method to potentially improve survival of cardiac arrest.  The company’s first device, the EleGARD Patient Positioning System, was launched for use in the US earlier this year.

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