CPR Therapeutics Founder Norman Paradis on Developing a New Approach to Automated CPR

A 30-Year-Old Johns Hopkins Idea Inspires a New CPR Technology

By-Hank Stolz
Photo- submitted

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Worcester, MA-CPR Therapeutics Inc. is developing a next-generation technology for cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Founder Norman Paradisd tells us,  “We’ve developed a device that does CPR much more effectively than anything currently available, also much safer. It doesn’t break ribs.” Supported by the NIH and NSF, the Company has developed a multimodal wrap-around type of CPR that is more effective and safer than current solutions. He uses an easy example to explain,  “It’s so easy to break an egg if you take your finger and push in on the shell, but if you wrap your hand all the way around the egg and squeeze evenly, it’s actually harder to break the egg.”

 “This idea was actually developed at Johns Hopkins about 30 years ago, and I was kind of the junior, junior minor person on that program. It looked so hard to get this developed and approved that they never followed up, but I never forgot about it and just kept trying to get the device actually built and developed.” said Paradis.

These devices improve blood flow, enhance the effectiveness of electrical countershock, and reduce the risk of CPR-related injury. They will be the first non-invasive automated devices to improve survival from sudden cardiac arrest. Paradis drives the point home on how much technology like this is needed, “On television, CPR works 90% of the time. In real life, it fails 90% of the time.” 

For a company based in rural Vermont what Auxilium can offer is key, “For us, the Auxilium MBI program, the accelerator, was always the dream incubator for us as a tiny medical device company. So, getting accepted into the program was literally step one for us in the process of finding investors, going to the FDA, we’re getting the kind of mentoring that we really needed.”

On the future – “The next step for us is to hopefully finish our discussion with the FDA, make the device available to cardiologists in hospitals, hopefully over the next year or two. And then as I said, hopefully begin to work with the federal agencies and the Department of Defense to get a portable version.” 

cprtherapeutics.com
Founder- Norman Paradis