Beijing Aerospace Changfeng's ECMO System ACM9000 Enters China's Priority Review Green Channel

BEIJING — Beijing Aerospace Changfeng Co., Ltd. has spent years building a portfolio of anesthesia machines and electric operating tables. Now the 30-year-old medical device maker is betting its future on something far more ambitious: a machine that can stand in for the human heart and lungs when they fail.

The company's intelligent, integrated extracorporeal cardiopulmonary support system — known in the industry as ECMO ACM9000 — has been accepted into China's priority review green channel, according to the 14th batch of priority review announcements published on June 16, 2026 by the Center for Medical Device Evaluation under the National Medical Products Administration (CMDE).

The product qualifies because it is included in China's National Key Research and Development Program, a designation that fast-tracks review for strategically important medical technologies.

An 'Artificial Heart-Lung'

ECMO — extracorporeal membrane oxygenation — is often called the "artificial heart-lung" in critical care medicine. The system provides continuous external respiration and circulation for patients with severe heart or lung failure, sustaining life when the body's own organs cannot.

According to Beijing Aerospace Changfeng's official communications, the ACM9000 differs from traditional ECMO systems through a multi-in-one design that is portable, intelligent, and built for easier operation by medical staff. It also supports data sharing and remote monitoring — features that could prove critical in China's push to upgrade critical care infrastructure across hospitals of all sizes.

A Decade of Preparation

Founded in 1994 and publicly listed since 2001, Beijing Aerospace Changfeng has built its business primarily in the operating room. The company currently has 16 registered medical device products on the market, according to data from Yaozhi Medical Devices. Anesthesia machines make up the largest share of its portfolio, followed by electric operating tables.

But behind the scenes, the company has been quietly assembling the intellectual property needed for a bigger play. It now holds 90 authorized patents, several of which are directly related to ECMO technology — including methods for detecting hematocrit and blood oxygen saturation based on ECMO, anticoagulation coatings and their application, oxygenators, and membrane fiber components for membrane lungs.

The patent trail shows a company that has been steadily building ECMO capabilities since at least 2010, with a noticeable acceleration in filings over the past three years.

A Billion-Yuan Market, Still Foreign-Dominated

The stakes are high. China's ECMO system market reached 1.002 billion yuan (approximately $138 million) in 2025, according to publicly available industry data. Yet the market remains dominated by foreign medical device giants — Medtronic and Maquet (a Getinge brand) among them — a pattern that repeats across much of China's high-end medical equipment landscape.

That is beginning to change. In recent years, domestic innovation in medical devices has accelerated, with Chinese companies breaking through technological barriers that once kept them locked out of premium segments. Government-backed volume-based procurement programs are further tilting the playing field toward homegrown products, giving domestic manufacturers a clearer path to hospital purchase orders.

For Beijing Aerospace Changfeng, the priority review designation is a significant milestone — but the real test will come when the ACM9000 reaches the bedside. In a market where foreign brands have set the standard, the company will need to prove not just that its machine works, but that it can compete on reliability, service, and trust when lives are on the line.