ELIZABETH JACKSON: Pneumonia is the biggest killer of newborns and young children around the world.
Ninety-five percent of those deaths are in developing countries, in remote locations usually where crucial oxygen supplies and antibiotics aren't available.
But a research team from the University of Melbourne has developed a low cost, electricity-free oxygen concentrator that has the potential to save thousands of children every year.
Kesha West reports.
KESHA WEST: It's a crisp winter's morning and Dr Bryn Sobott and the other members of his research team are making the trek with their equipment down this steep hill on his parents' Victorian farm to the dam below.
Dr Sobott, in particular, has lost count of how many times he's gone up and down this hill in the last couple of years testing and re-testing a simple system run on water that he hopes will help save the lives of newborn babies and children with pneumonia in remote parts of the world.
So how does it all work Bryn?
BRYN SOBOTT: So we have water flowing from the dam down through this pipe and up through the siphon. And as the water rises, the pressure drops and we actually get a vacuum that we can apply to our bellow system and the combination of the two lets us concentrate oxygen.
KESHA WEST: This is the third prototype of the FRE02, which stands for Fully Renewable Energy Oxygen.
Professor Roger Rassool, also from the University of Melbourne's School of Physics, is part of the research team.
ROGER RASSOOL: As scientists we thought AIDS and malaria are the big killers out there, but to find out that pneumonia was such a big problem in the real world and that the solution was so straightforward. The solution being that just giving oxygen for 48 hours or so to these young little babies would actually help their life outcomes.
KESHA WEST: Globally more than 1.5 million children die each year from pneumonia.
In developing countries like Papua New Guinea, it's the single biggest killer of babies and children under five.
Associate Professor Jim Black is from the Nossal Institute for Global Health.
JIM BLACK: There's more pneumonia in a country like Papua New Guinea because children are exposed to household smoke around the cooking fires, they have difficult access to the health service. But even when they get to the health service and the health worker makes the right diagnosis, they can't treat the children with the most severe pneumonia because they don't have access to oxygen. And that's what this project is trying to tackle.
KESHA WEST: Pneumonia deaths are largely preventable.
In Australia, where treatment is readily available, survival rates are very high but pneumonia quickly becomes deadly for newborns in remote areas that don't have access to oxygen sources, often due to a lack of electricity.
This is where the FRE02 comes in, says Jim Black.
JIM BLACK: In a child with severe pneumonia, their lungs are so badly damaged that they just don't have enough lung tissue available to exchange oxygen and put it into their tissues.
So if you give them enriched oxygen, say 95 per cent of the air they are breathing in is actually oxygen, then it can tide them over until the antibiotics begin to work.
KESHA WEST: Earlier this month, USAID and the Gates Foundation awarded a grant to the Melbourne team that will allow field testing of the FRE02 project.
In about three to six months, the research team will have a prototype developed from this one, first tested on this Victorian farm, to send thousands of kilometres north to Papua New Guinea.
If the PNG trial is successful, Dr Bryn Sobott says the team are hoping FRE02 systems can be implemented worldwide
BRYN SOBOTT: Of course the recognition is amazing, but we need to deliver in terms of saving that first child, and then of course it's scalable and sustainable.
ELIZABETH JACKSON: That's Dr Bryn Sobott ending that report from Kesha West.