Trelleborg showcases medical device innovations at Connect in Pharma

Trelleborg Healthcare & Medical exhibits advanced solutions for healthcare and medical applications at Connect in Pharma in Geneva, Switzerland, at booth D24, from June 14 to 15, 2023.

Visitors to the Trelleborg stand can learn about specialist multicomponent technology that creates unique components beyond the capability of other methods, extending the boundaries of manufacturing innovation. Medical device manufacturers benefit from a process that helps meet their design goals, including reducing the size and weight of components, while increasing their robustness and improving quality, lowering total cost of ownership.

Trelleborg’s Liquid Silicone Rubber (LSR) specialists employ highly sophisticated tools and process engineering to develop novel solutions, combining two or more individual materials and components into one fully bonded, robust component. This multicomponent injection moulding or co-injection – commonly referred to as 2K or 2-shot – produces parts that are more hygienic, eradicating the dead space where bacteria can breed, and lowers costs by cutting out assembly and reducing the number of components in the customer’s supply chain.

A related technology – micromoulding - is critical to the miniaturisation of devices so small they are comfortably wearable and implantable. Components below 10 milligrams in weight are possible using needlepoint injection technology and fully automated parts handling. Trelleborg’s high-dimensional flashless and wasteless design principles create micromoulded parts virtually flash-free and not requiring secondary deflashing.

Florance Veronelli, segment manager at Trelleborg Healthcare & Medical, says: “With the development of ever-smaller sophisticated medical devices, component manufacturers are challenged to produce multi-function devices of increasingly compact dimensions. Micromoulding and multicomponent LSR technologies provide a solution to this issue.

“Extending design options further than most other technologies, multicomponent moulding enables medical device developers the opportunity to go beyond simple function. Virtually boundless product profiles and geometries offer device designers options that they may not even be aware of.”

At this year's Connect in Pharma Trelleborg is also featuring multi-lumen silicone tubing for a variety of critical applications including pacemakers and urological implants. Trelleborg's proprietary GeoTrans extrusion process enables creation of tubing geometries during extrusion, allowing for a wide range of customer-specific designs. GeoTrans also allows for silicone to change cross-section during extrusion to eliminate moulding and secondary bonding steps, providing a strong, hygienic design. These attributes reduce risks, the amount of work involved in assembly and downstream processes, and lower costs, while significantly improving the usability of medical products.

Trelleborg Healthcare & Medical is a leading exponent of customised parts often used in implantable healthcare and medical devices. In-house precision tooling and expertise enable Trelleborg to create custom silicone and thermoplastic moulded parts with tight tolerances, while satisfying the need for rapid product development with quick turnaround prototypes. The Rapid Development Center in Delano, Minnesota, US, provides Trelleborg’s global healthcare and medical customers with a single partner for design, rapid prototyping, development, and serial production, ensuring cost control and scalability of customers’ solutions.

Also featured are drug-eluting 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 is ideal for production of 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.