By Andrew Metzger, Sr. Director of Corporate Strategy, Solesis, parent company of Secant Group
Medical device design starts at raw material selection. However, medical device manufacturers often need foundational guidance about medical device textiles — how they’re made, how they function inside a device, and how to choose the right materials based on device application. Different considerations often apply to raw material selection, prototyping, and scale-up, and medical device manufacturers can be at a loss for where to start. Therefore, they are well-served by securing the guidance of a medical component partner — ideally, a supplier who is dedicated solely to textiles: a textile expert.
Device manufacturers know from a high level that they need fabrics for their devices. But inexperience, often coupled with a lack of understanding about how the material selection process works, can slow decision-making and impact project timelines. Additionally, device manufacturers — despite being experts in their device and its functionality — may not always immediately grasp the nuances of how different textiles perform within the context of different applications in a way that ensures optimal benefit to patients.
A textile expert’s narrow focus on textiles streamlines product development. The ideal supplier has been entrenched in the process for decades, offering fundamental knowledge of the product lifecycle from relationship-building at the prototyping stage and material selection to polymer science and finished textile components for small runs or scaling up for commercialization.
While some textile component suppliers may bog down initial discussions by sidetracking customers about stent or catheter design, a supplier dedicated solely to textiles keeps the discussion focused on what is necessary to provide a customer with the best textile material for their device, whether it’s for a cardiovascular, general surgery, orthopedic, or neurovascular application. Organizations with bundled services can slow product development and necessitate the completion of numerous partnership agreements before textile design can begin in earnest.
The medical device engineer’s goal is the same as that of the textile-focused supplier: a fast project start that concentrates solely on textiles, rather than every aspect of the project. To this end, the expert supplier has readily available samples and off-the-shelf (OTS) fabrics for customer consideration, offers next-day quotes for small runs, and delivers a prototype within a few weeks.
A Fabric Solution for Every Challenge
Secant continuously identifies challenges associated with implantable medical devices and develops solutions guided by the flexible nature of textiles. This is accomplished by monitoring the market via customer projects and interactions, staying informed on market trends, and constantly striving for new knowledge to enhance medical devices with our custom services and capabilities. A singular focus on textiles ensures we approach every medical device problem with a textile solution, which fosters innovation.
Informed by more than 80 years of experience in providing textile-based solutions, Secant can give customers confidence in material selection and utilization during the early stages of product development, enabling customers to focus on other activities such as prepping for clinical trials. With experience-based insight, Secant is innately proactive in identifying device design or performance problems before they arise or as they occur, without the need for a direct request from the customer. Streamlining these early steps accelerates discussions, which can set the stage for a valuable solutions-based relationship.
Early Value is Everything
Material selection can be a big pain point for medical device manufacturers. An expert textile partner establishes its value early in a partnership by streamlining this complex process. Secant has provided fabrics for countless medical devices that use textiles. As a result, our sketch-to-scale capabilities are derived from decades’ worth of textile designs, many of which have become the industry standard. Moreover, this allows us to offer many viable OTS fabrics and custom-engineered textile solutions to meet specific device applications.
Translating customer needs internally must happen quickly to provide value. The ideal textile partner facilitates that urgency with technical and business teams that are equal in their knowledge of textiles and in-house capabilities: design and development, prototyping, analytical testing, core competencies (e.g., braiding, knitting, weaving), and post-processing techniques, for example. This expertise extends to predicate devices and components, powered by access to operational staff trained on specific equipment and work within standard operations.
In addition to simplifying the textile-selection process — from raw material selection and design (e.g., building in application-specific characteristics such as pick density and permeability) to prototyping and finishing — a textile expert strives to provide transparency in all operations. Customers may come into the process “blind,” but once they see CAD and SEM assets during development — and eventually fabric and prototype iterations — they are able to better understand the value of working directly with an expert textile partner. In other words, the work speaks for itself.
Final Thoughts
While identifying, sourcing, and implementing appropriate textiles for a medical device may initially seem stressful and likely to delay development timelines, a textile expert can alleviate all these concerns by streamlining the process with high transparency and an educational touch, from selecting raw materials and prototyping to scale-up. Medical device manufacturers who work with a supplier partner who is solely dedicated to designing, modifying, and manufacturing medical textiles for implantable devices can confidently make decisions that keep projects on track for launch.
To learn more, discuss custom and off-the-shelf fabric options, or explore the benefits and applications of different textile-forming technologies, visit secant.com.
About The Author
Andrew Metzger is Sr. Director of Corporate Strategy at Solesis. Andrew leads Solesis’ medical device component business strategy, developing long-term growth plans with a focus on solving unmet needs within cardiovascular, general surgery, neurovascular, and orthopedic markets. Andrew has a Bachelor of Science degree in biomedical engineering from Drexel University.
About Secant Group
Secant Group designs and develops custom-engineered, next-generation textiles and biomaterials solutions that enable repair, recovery, and regeneration of the human body.
With decades of experience in implantable medical component design, development, and manufacturing, Secant Group gives market leaders confidence to innovate more boldly across medical devices, tissue engineering, and drug delivery to make life-changing breakthroughs more accessible to more patients with unmet needs.
From prototyping to commercialization, Secant Group is the collaborative, integrated partner of choice in the cardiovascular, neurovascular, orthopedic, surgical, and pharmaceutical spaces.
