Description of ovine model for testing ventilator prototypes in the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed a ventilator deficit in the global health system for this scenario. For this reason, several national and international projects have been developed to get done prototypes of ventilators which could be easy and fast to manufacture. One of the requirements of the AEMPS for conducting clinical studies with new prototypes is through the validation of these new prototypes in an animal model. Therefore, it is important to achieve an animal model which allows us to easily reproduce different clinical scenarios. In this article, we describe the use of a sheep as a research model to assess a prototype ventilator. The animal was anesthetized for 10 h in which the prototype was tested in up to 6 different scenarios. This model is effective and easy to reproduce, making it an excellent choice for this kind of research.