Medical Device Link.

TECH UPDATE

In addition to providing custom materials, tubing suppliers are diversifying their service offerings. Command Medical offers secondary operations, such as tip forming and pad printing, in addition to its tubing products.

Improving on what they already know—and the materials they already have—tubing suppliers are both specializing and diversifying their product and service offerings. Driven by the medical industry's demand for smaller products and tighter tolerances, some tubing companies are taking on new roles creating custom materials and offering secondary operations.

Due to the performance characteristics required of products for critical applications such as minimally invasive surgery (MIS), product designs are becoming increasingly complex. “For example, specs used to just be ID/OD/wall,” says Mark Saab, president, Advanced Polymers Inc. (Salem, NH). “Now it's those three dimensions plus a two-page list of other requirements.” As a result, tubing suppliers are enhancing their products so that they can be seen under x-ray or so that they offer other application-specific performance characteristics.

But to accommodate this growing list of required performance characteristics, tubing suppliers are being forced to get creative, especially in the case of materials. Using the materials and processes they already have, medical tubing suppliers have had to become responsible for creating new materials for their niche markets, Saab notes. Because the volume of material required by medical tubing companies is so small—especially in terms of catheter manufacturing—raw material suppliers don't have an incentive to focus on the needs of the medical tubing industry or take on the relatively high liability factor that comes with it, he says.

In light of this stumbling block, tubing suppliers are formulating their own resin blends using standard materials, custom blending different resins, such as PTFE to improve lubricity, for example. “Tubing suppliers are becoming more diversified in that there are new ‘designer blends’ coming out,” says Chris Nagao, sales engineer for David Schnur Associates (Los Altos, CA), a company that represents several tubing manufacturers.

Suppliers are also relying on these custom blends in order to pursue the goal of achieving smaller tubing with tighter tolerances, Nagao adds. “There is a limit to what you can extrude and still maintain wall integrity and performance characteristics,” she says. “But every time [the engineers] say ‘that’s as small as we can go,’ we see them take the challenge and succeed in the effort to move that limit line to [a point that is] stronger, smaller, and thinner.”

In addition to providing new materials, tubing suppliers are further diversifying their service offerings by moving down their own process lines, Saab points out. “I see a lot of tubing companies starting to do secondary operations to provide the next level of service,” he says. Command Medical Products Inc. (Ormond Beach, FL) is a tubing supplier that also offers services such as tip forming, eye punching, pad printing, assembly, and packaging. “We are able to reduce lead times and provide turnkey manufacturing services for tube sets and other assemblies that incorporate tubing,” says Stephanie McGee, director of sales and marketing at Command Medical. “The idea is that it is more cost effective and likely to yield higher quality by having one company extrude the tubing and perform downstream processing,” she adds.