Trelleborg Healthcare & Medical

Innovative, Engineered Solutions for Medical Device Manufacturing

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Andrew Gaillard, Senior Global Commercial Director, Chris Tellers, Director of the Trelleborg Healthcare & Medical Rapid Development Center

In the medical and pharmaceutical device industry, manufacturing and launching new products to the market is a time-consuming affair that entails numerous risks. With medical devices getting smaller and more complex, it is becoming a challenge for manufacturers to smoothly transition from the initial concept to production without facing multiple occasions of failure. Also, as 80 to 90 percent of the manufacturing costs are designed into the product, a poor design decision can result in significant costs for the device manufacturer due to redesign, requalification, delayed sales, and possibly loss of first-tomarket advantage. As a result, medical device prototyping becomes fundamental to the design and development process. Prototyping helps verify that the designs can be manufactured reliably and affordably. It also enables device developers to evaluate the look, feel, function, and precision of the product before investing significant resources in a specific design. This is why manufacturers look for experts who can assist them with new component design, rapid prototyping, and scale up to serial production.

This is where Trelleborg Healthcare & Medical steps in.

Partnering with medical device manufacturers, Trelleborg Healthcare & Medical exercises its engineering expertise to help address challenges at the design stage. This enables clients to bring high-quality products to market faster while meeting stringent industry standards. Trelleborg’s Rapid Development Center (RDC) helps customers design new components and build prototypes for testing purposes. The RDC team also quickly redesigns and rebuilds prototypes in case of a failed iteration. “In the last 12 months, we have realized the importance of getting involved earlier in the design phase of a project. It enables us to focus more on long-term production and ensure our customers succeed in producing effective devices,” says Andrew Gaillard, Senior Global Commercial Director, Trelleborg Healthcare & Medical. “Our Rapid Development Center makes it quicker and easier for us to practice design for manufacturability (DfM) and scale designs to full-scale production.”

What sets Trelleborg apart from the rest of the industry is its vertical integration capability, which refers to the company’s ability to do everything from product design to high-volume, long-term manufacturing. “We have vertically integrated into our Rapid Development Center several core competencies that are critical to the medical device industry, including prototyping, 3D printing, design, consultation, high-precision machining, silicone molding, thermoplastic molding, automation, and secondary operations,” says Chris Tellers, Director of the Trelleborg Healthcare & Medical Rapid Development Center. “Our team of experts can help customers make simple design changes to a part that has no impact on part performance but can have significant impact on long term part quality and cost. ”

Our Rapid Development Center makes it quicker and easier for us to practice design for manufacturability (DfM) and progress designs to full-scale production

To further assist customers with development and production of high-quality devices that conform to industry standards, Trelleborg also considers the compliance side of its business. “In the medical sector, the origin of raw materials is an important factor that can impact the effectiveness and quality of the end product. That’s why we provide raw material certifications for all the prototype parts we make,” explains Tellers. “The certificate provides traceability, informing customers of the origin of all materials.”

With such capabilities, Trelleborg works hand-in-hand with customers, to ensure the production of the best medical device in the market. To elucidate, Tellers recalls one instance when a renowned medical device company reached out to Trelleborg to resolve the field failures in one of its high-pressure sealing applications. Collaborating with the customer, Trelleborg reviewed the design, explored innovative engineering options, and started design development. However, the parts failed the test the first time. Having learned from what went wrong, Trelleborg made some tweaks and successfully built a prototype within a week. Currently, the client is building 400 more parts with Trelleborg to complete its internal testing. “We always aim to work handin-hand with our customers as an extension of their project teams throughout the design process,” adds Tellers.

This is just one example! Trelleborg has proven its excellence time and time again in driving exceptional results for its customers. Looking ahead, the Trelleborg team is focusing heavily on exploring capabilities that may help further reduce lead times and enable customers to accelerate time to market. The company is also probing the potential of 3D printing technology to identify additional capabilities that could augment its rapid prototyping arsenal. “We’re looking forward to becoming the go-to strategic supplier for our customers. Trelleborg is vigorously moving toward offering best-in-class solutions and an equally competitive Rapid Development Center. We’re constantly experimenting with new materials, machining, and molding processes in an effort to expand our extrusion and prototyping capabilities and are very excited about what the future holds for the Rapid Development Center,” concludes Gaillard.

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Trelleborg Healthcare & Medical

Company
Trelleborg Healthcare & Medical

Management
Andrew Gaillard, Senior Global Commercial Director, Chris Tellers, Director of the Trelleborg Healthcare & Medical Rapid Development Center

Description
Trelleborg Healthcare & Medical helps pharmaceutical and medical device companies improve patient quality of life by forming lasting partnerships with customers to develop innovative, reliable engineered polymer solutions for demanding medical, biotech and pharmaceutical applications. From a single global source, backed by the expertise of their worldwide engineering and manufacturing network, the company partners medical device manufacturers in all stages of development, from concept to serial production, to provide optimum solutions to meet all healthcare and medical application challenges

Trelleborg Healthcare & Medical News

Trelleborg provides polymer solution expertise at Pharmapack

Trelleborg Healthcare & Medical is showcasing its expertise in the development and manufacture of engineered polymer solutions for customers in the medical and pharmaceutical industries at Pharmapack on 1st-2nd February 2023.

Trelleborg will explain how to help customers meet the requirements and global standards of the healthcare and medical industry with safe and durable solutions. From the initial idea to the deliverable product and beyond, Trelleborg partners with customers to guide them through the development process, providing support in specification of materials including application-specific hoses, liquid silicone rubber (LSR) or thermoplastic injection mouldings, and the production of parts using multicomponent processes.

Florance Veronelli, segment manager Healthcare & Medical Europe, said: "Trelleborg offers full expertise in material selection, product design and manufacturing capabilities for components or subassemblies for medical devices. At Pharmapack we will demonstrate how we partner with customers to develop vital technologies from the very beginning.

"Trelleborg Healthcare & Medical invests heavily in research and development, operating eight competence centres worldwide, including one in Stuttgart, Germany, and one in Stein am Rhein, Switzerland. At our Rapid Development Center in Delano, Minnesota, US, we use innovative technologies to support the product development of medical and pharmaceutical components, and to produce and test multiple design iterations within a very short period of time to expedite market readiness."

Among the products featured at this year's Pharmapack are multi-lumen LSR tubing for a variety of critical applications including pacemakers and urological implants. Trelleborg's GeoTrans extrusion process enables creation of a variety of tubing geometries during extrusion, allowing for a wide range of customer-specific designs. GeoTrans also allows for the silicone tubes to change cross-section during extrusion to eliminate moulding, connector assembling or secondary bonding steps, providing a strong, hygienic design. These attributes reduce risks, the amount of work involved in assembly and downstream processes, and lowers costs, while significantly improving the usability of medical products.

Also featured are combination products, where a medical device incorporates an Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient (API). Becoming increasingly important in medical treatment, combination products are applied or implanted directly to an affected site and offer numerous advantages over oral administration, injection, or infusion. Benefits include the ability to provide very precise dosing and the reduction of side effects outside an affected site.

The process can be used for skin patches for pain relief or anti-inflammatory implants for the treatment of conditions including eye diseases. Trelleborg will present several examples of such implants and showcase our expertise in the complete development, manufacture, and assembly process of drug delivery components, including a silicone matrix in combination with one or more APIs.

Trelleborg Healthcare & Medical also offers some of the most sophisticated micromoulding capabilities, overmoulding LSR or plastic over another substrate, such as metal or electronic components. This technique can reduce the overall size of the assembled part and eliminate the need to combine multiple small components together in a secondary process. Multicomponent moulding can extend design options as no other technology can do, giving medical device developers the opportunity to go beyond function.