A young man was brought to the emergency room of Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem in traumatic cardiac arrest after shrapnel tore his inferior vena cava, the big vein in the middle of the belly. The young trauma surgeon opened the young man’s chest to start internal cardiac massage.
At the same time, he instructed his team to use HemaShock, which they’d learned about when treating soldiers during army reserve duty.
Applied in emergency cases of dangerously low systolic blood pressure caused by hemorrhagic shock or cardiac arrest, this unique exsanguination tourniquet squeezes all the blood from the patient’s arms or legs and blocks its reentry to the limb.
This brings the patient’s own blood, with all its clotting factors and intact oxygen-carrying capacity, into the core organs. There’s no need to wait for a blood transfusion, and the heart doesn’t have to pump blood all the way to the limbs.
“Lo and behold, the patient’s heart started beating again. They were then able to operate and repair the vena cava,” relates Dr. Noam Gavriely, founder and chief medical officer of OHK Medical Devices, the Israel-based parent company that developed HemaShock and other products.
Here’s another case: A 30-year-old woman in Germany had moderate vaginal bleeding after a surgical procedure. A few days later, while hiking with a friend, she collapsed. When medics reached her by helicopter, she was unconscious and had very low blood pressure. Attempts to revive her with fluids and medication failed, so they applied the HemaShock device they had on the helicopter. HemaShock can be quickly applied by a single medical caregiver, even during transport.
“And immediately, her [systolic] blood pressure went up above 100. She woke up, complaining that it’s painful. But it saved her life. So they gave her some pain medicine and took her to the hospital, where she was treated and soon went home,” Gavriely tells ISRAEL21c.
“This incident taught us that HemaShock can be helpful in gynecology and obstetrics as well, for example in cases of post-epidural drop in blood pressure or postpartum hemorrhaging.”
Covid-caused delay
We wrote about HemaShock in 2019 (click here to read the article) when it was under development.
But soon thereafter, the Covid pandemic hit the world, and OHK Medical put HemaShock back on the shelf. Gavriely put his energies into inventing a heavy-duty ventilator mask to block the coronavirus from entering the respiratory system.
The company also concentrated its efforts on further advancing sales of its flagship product, HemaClear, a sterile exsanguination tourniquet to stop bleeding, for example in orthopedic surgery.
HemaClear is sold in 52 countries in North America, Latin America, Europe, China, the Middle East and the Far East. This game-changing product has been used in more than 2 million cases.
“About two years ago, we went back to HemaShock. We didn’t completely waste the time because during those two years we gathered more and more experience in using HemaShock in cardiac arrest and in hemorrhagic shock,” says Gavriely.
Ongoing clinical studies
The product earned FDA and CE approval and is distributed through subsidiaries and partners in eight countries; additionally, it will be available soon in Spain and Italy. Meanwhile, additional clinical trials are going on in Israel and abroad.
“There are two studies that got approval from the Ethics Committee here in Israel, one in Beilinson Medical Center that will use HemaShock to revive patients in cardiac arrest, and another at HaEmek Medical Center focused on treating patients in severe hemorrhagic shock,” says Gavriely.
A paper has been submitted for publication by a medical team in Maribor, Slovenia, showing that HemaShock increased the number of hemorrhagic shock patients who experienced return of spontaneous circulation, with a statistically significant increase in the amount of carbon dioxide exiting the body — meaning the tissues were getting more oxygen.
Efrat Gavriely, the founder’s daughter and a former intensive care nurse now working in the company, points out that the clinical trials are being done in hospitals “because that’s where we can get a lot of the data to show, but eventually the HemaShock product is meant for first responders with very basic training and not a lot of utilities in the field.”
OHK Medical Devices
OHK is headquartered in Tirat Carmel, where 21 employees work. A fully owned subsidiary registered in Michigan sells the company’s devices in the United States from a warehouse in southern California. OHK employs seven people in other countries in addition to independent contractors and distributors.
Gavriely says there are no other products on the market that compete with HemaShock. But HemaClear has lots of competition.
“Only in China there are 17 copycats. There’s a Turkish copycat. There’s Indian copycat and a Korean copycat. And you know what happened? Our sales only went up. The [copycat] products are inferior both clinically and commercially. So, like the food court at the airport, we welcome them all because we know that our product is better and in the right price.”
OHK also launched Hema-T, a tourniquet meant to prevent life-threatening blood loss from an open wound of an arm or a leg, soon after the October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel. Gavriely says the mass casualty event sped up the product’s release.
“We were almost ready with the product, but once we heard there was a shortage of tourniquets, within 24 hours we produced over 1,000 units and supplied them where needed,” he says. “We donated quite a few units of both HemaShock and Hema-T in Israel and Ukraine.”
As for the ViriMask, he says, it’s been updated and motorized for easier use. “Basically the market right now is dormant, but if the need arises for any reason, we are ready,” says Gavriely.
“We are well known as an orthopedic company, but in the last few years we’ve shifted into emergency medicine. That’s where our passion is. Last September, we got a nice grant from the Israel Innovation Authority to do just that,” he continues.
In the future, his company will introduce two additional products aimed at improving the grim reality that only 2.3 percent of people end up surviving with functioning cognition after undergoing CPR following cardiac arrest. “CPR does not save the brain. With our products, we want to change this outcome.”
