The future of artificial lungs: an industry perspective

 The artificial lung was first developed in 1939 and transformed from a research project to a commercial product in the 1970s. The commercial product is called an oxygenator. Driven by a market desire and market growth in conjunction with the growth of cardiac surgery, many companies developed competitive oxygenators. After a couple of decades of competitive development, oxygenator technology has improved drastically. As the oxygenator market has matured, it has become less profitable and now shows a low growth rate. Because of this, industry has reduced the development effort for future oxygenators. However, thanks to these developments, we now have a significant technology base to apply to the artificial lung. Now it is time to go to the next step toward a true artificial lung. To achieve this, the most important thing to understand is the market needs. Received: July 30, 2002 Correspondence to:A. Nogawa