Tech company Dyson, which has a factory in Malmesbury, has landed a government contract to manufacture 10,000 ventilators to help deal with the coronavirus crisis.
The Singapore based firm, headed by British inventor Sir James Dyson, said it had designed a new type of ventilator in response to a call on behalf of the NHS.
It hopes to build the ventilators at the firm’s UK base in Wiltshire.
However, the start of production could take weeks to move from prototype to the device being made in significant scale.
A ventilator is a machine that helps a person breathe by getting oxygen into the lungs and removing carbon dioxide
Dyson will work alongside The Technology Partnership, a medical company based in Cambridge.
Currently, the NHS has just over 8,000 ventilators and the government is aiming to procure a further 8,000 from existing domestic and international suppliers.
It is estimated that the NHS will need at least 30,000 to care for expected numbers of virus victims.
Meanwhile, the consortium of medical, military and civil engineering companies - which includes Airbus, Meggit, GKN and others - is working to ramp up the production of an existing design.
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