COVID-19: AXA partners with 101 to support intensive care units

Professor, what led to the creation of Foundation 101?

Every year, tens of millions of patients are admitted to intensive care because of a life-threatening condition. However, from one hospital to the next there are discrepancies in practices and performances that can increase mortality by heart failure and increase the risk of nosocomial infection considerably.

We created 101 to take the randomness – and injustice – out of the equation, in order to guarantee that each patient receives precise medical care, and maximise the chances of survival and full recovery.

We achieve these goals through a network of international intensive care centers around the world, by collecting data and making them quickly available to the entire network.

What are the objectives of the Foundation?

Our objective is to save lives. Simply put, our strategy involves:

• using technology intensively to help caregivers improve their practices using research evidence.
• accelerating research and its use by merging clinical research and care through the development of artificial intelligence algorithms and new methodologies for rapid and pragmatic clinical trials.
• supporting patients and their families, for whom hospitalization in intensive care is deeply traumatic.

How does this strategy benefit the efforts to fight the Covid-19 pandemic?

Medical reanimation or resuscitation is a specialty that was little known to the general public until recently. Now we have a huge collective responsibility, and the COVID-19 epidemic is putting all intensive care units under increased pressure.

COVID-19 coronavirus infections can lead to viral pneumonia and acute respiratory failure, which require artificial ventilation in ICU (intensive care unit) beds. There is no specific and effective antiviral treatment available today. Patient survival depends on the quality of symptomatic treatment in ICU. There are real differences between centers and there is an urgent need to improve the management of infected patients. So we can make a real difference here.

How can donations to the Foundation help?

The Endowment Fund 101 is in a unique position to save lives during the epidemic because:

• it is a targeted initiative on reanimation, which is key in short term for the remediation of COVID-19.
• It is a network with global reach, with more than 1,200 of the 16,000 centers worldwide.
• our objective is to collect data and develop algorithms in the most efficient centers in order to make them rapidly available to the network and the entire international reanimation community.

The partnership with and support from AXA is therefore significant because it will enable us to deploy the training programs, implement the clinical research program, and develop the artificial intelligence algorithms that will help us predict the occurrence of complications that could prolong hospitalization or lead to death in these patients. This is crucial in our quest to adapt available resources to this type of situation.