Q and A: How Protolabs and Essentium are helping fight Covid-19

MPN editor Laura Hughes reached out to Blake Teipel (BT), CEO and co-founder of Essentium, and Gurvinder Singh (GS), global product director, injection moulding at Protolabs, to find out how the companies were helping with the pandemic.

LH: Please start by telling me about your organisation.

BT: As innovators in both materials and production platforms, our vision is to transform traditional manufacturing processes by bringing strength and speed together, at scale, with a no-compromise material set. By developing an entire system, our goal is to reinvent the financial aspect of industrial 3D printing to make it more accessible to a wider range of manufacturers, including the biomedical sector. We are committed to advancing additive manufacturing capabilities and creating a global, open ecosystem that puts customers in control of their innovation.

GS: Protolabs is a digital manufacturing source for rapid prototyping and on-demand production. The company produces custom parts and assemblies in as fast as one day with automated 3D printing, CNC machining, sheet metal fabrication, and injection moulding processes. Its digital approach to manufacturing enables accelerated time to market, reduces development and production costs, and minimises risk throughout the product life cycle.

LH: How are you working to help the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic?

BT: Essentium, led by the company’s Covid-19 Response Strategy Team, has been working non-stop to investigate how we can mobilise our resources and significant IP in materials and additive manufacturing production to aid in the fight against Covid-19.

We have designed, and are now in production of, a protective mask kit comprising a reusable 3D printed mask frame and filtration media. The first run of 500 masks is being delivered to the Pflugerville Police and Fire Department following an order from the City of Pflugerville’s Pflugerville Community Development. As Essentium redirects resources to the production of this Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), we anticipate initial production capacity to be 5,000 units per week. 

GS: Protolabs serves the medical industry, as well as many other industries. We continue to serve all industries, but during this pandemic, we’ve seen an influx of Covid-19 related medical components needing urgent production; ranging from test kits to personal protective equipment - shields, masks and respirators and components for lifesaving ventilators. We’ve established internal protocols to prioritise these orders ahead of all others and waived expedite fees in order to quickly get critical medical supplies into the market.

LH: Blake, please tell me how you developed the masks with the reusable frame?

BT: We established a manufacturing process centre in ten days which houses an Essentium High Speed Extrusion (HSE) 3D printing platform. The Essentium reusable mask frame is made using material known as Essentium TPU74D (thermoplastic urethane) which allows for easy cleaning, and is used with a single-use, replaceable filtration media.

The Essentium mask has been created for general use during Covid-19 epidemic, based on FDA Emergency Use Authorisation and may be used when FDA cleared masks are unavailable. The company has made the design of the mask freely available through the National Institute of Health (NIH) open source model. 

LH: Have you developed any other devices to help?

BT: Essentium is currently focused on developing reusable masks using approved materials, and produced to approved design, that can be delivered at scale with reliable and repeatable quality. That said, the Covid-19 crisis has intensified the role additive manufacturing is set to play in supporting PPE supply chains that are impacted by traditional manufacturing and imports. We will take our learnings and, in coordination with the medical community, federal, state and industry bodies, replicate this approach to the next urgent need where shifting our resource and capacity will serve most use in gaining ground against this virus. 

LH: Gurvinder, please tell me how you are developing tests and supplies?

GS: Due to the exponential growth of Covid-19 cases, the speed of response is so critical for our customers and our nation. At Protolabs, we have always prided ourselves in being the fastest digital manufacturer in the world powered by our proprietary approach of converging software and hardware platforms. This speed has enabled us to respond to our customers as we have been able to cut new tools and ship parts in a matter of days.

Additionally, agility and flexibility is embedded in our on-demand production business model. For years, these capabilities have enabled our customers to respond appropriately and swiftly to unforeseen market demands. And no one could have predicted the current black swan event that we are in. We are able to partner at every step in our customer's journey from product conception, through design, prototyping, production and scale. Our suite of on-demand services has enabled our customers to quickly prototype in 3D printing or CNC and then scale to volumes required with injection moulding.

Traditional manufacturing is centred on maximising utilisation of plant and equipment and driving cost down, this in turns leaves little room for customisation or transformation of the plant to address new market needs. Our infinite capacity model completely flips this age-old concept around. We build our plants to address high product mix and demand volatility. This model provides unique advantage to respond to the mix of components required for ventilators, masks and shields and have the plant capacity to scale to the quantities required.

Our digital manufacturing services lend well to this urgency, and we’re honoured and humbled that it has been able to help make a difference.

LH: Did you work or are you working with any other organisations?

BT: Essentium worked with a partner to provide filtration media that has been tested and certified at Nelson Labs according to ASTM standard. We are also working as part of a coordinated effort with civil and national defence bodies, local government, federal bodies such as OSHA and the FDA, industry guidelines such as Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) that guarantees reproducibility of product quality to set specifications, and the medical equipment manufacturers. 

GS: Protolabs is honoured to be able to do what we can to help fight this virus and we are working nonstop to develop components for all three critical medical needs: Lifesaving ventilators, testing kits and preventive components including masks and shields. The following are just a few of the ways the company is using our expertise to support:

1. University of Minnesota medical doctors reached out to us to help them quickly manufacture six different prototype components for their low-cost ventilator in order to accelerate its FDA approval, which they have now received, and quickly get to mass production.
2. ZVerse, a developer of the only CAD as a Service (CADaaS) platform for digital manufacturing, turned to Protolabs to produce millions of headbands that will hold faceshields.
3. We’re supporting Ventec Life Systems as they partner with General Motors to mass produce ventilators in response to Covid-19. We are 3D printing and shipping thousands of production parts for Ventec's critical care ventilators that will support front line medical professionals fighting the pandemic.
4. NeuMoDx, a molecular diagnostics company worked with us to expedite the production of 5,000 components needed for Covid-19 test kit production. They will be leaning on us for tens of thousands of additional units over the coming weeks.
5. Solaire Medical, a company that produces medical carts and other equipment related to the transportation of medical supplies, is relying on Protolabs to produce parts that go in procedure carts to store medical supplies in the fight against Covid-19. They needed to fulfill quick ship requests from facilities as a result of ICU's ramping up capacity.
6. ISINNOVA, an Italian research institute, turned to Protolabs to produce valves that will go into 100 3D printed kits that will convert snorkeling masks into hospital ventilator masks for frontline medical staff.
7. OptoGlo reached out to us to help expedite an urgent order for 10,000 clips that will enable a face shield to be attached to the front of any baseball cap. These are urgently needed by many hospitals around the country. OptoGlo anticipates they will place additional orders for them.

LH: How has the pandemic affected the day-to-day running of your business?

BT: We are an essential business based on the clients we serve, so we are still in operation albeit with amended schedules and processes. We had planned to set-up a manufacturing process centre this year but seeing how the global supply chain for PPE was struggling, we knew we could step in. We set up the centre in just ten days to produce masks that can be delivered with reliable and repeatable quality, at scale. We did this with our designers, engineers and scientists working on-site, but due to Covid-19 work-from-home advice, more than half of our team were not physically at the facility during the deployment of the new centre.

GS: Employee health and safety is our number one priority, and we have put CDC and WHO-recommended guidelines in place at our plants and other facilities throughout the world.

Right now we are operating normally for all medical and non-medical orders—while prioritising medical orders.

The way we interact with customers has not changed, as we are an e-commerce-enabled company. However, we are prioritising projects which are needed to equip our medical system to treat patients with Covid-19 and providing these customers with additional consultative design assistance to rapidly get these parts produced. Additionally, most of our manufacturing operations are digitised and automated meaning we have fewer labor requirements than conventional manufacturers.

LH: Do you think the pandemic will have a lasting effect on your business? If so, how?

BT: We are likely to see a lasting shift in the way manufacturing operates. The virus is bringing people together to embrace digital technology like additive manufacturing to overcome challenges such as sourcing parts currently produced in offshore locations. Additive manufacturing can be effective in the fight against coronavirus, because it doesn’t rely on a global supply chain. It enables a company to shift its sourcing of parts from remote locations like China to on-site production facilities. It also accelerates time to market, because additive manufacturers can make needed parts in a matter of hours, solving the current problem of companies waiting to receive parts from global suppliers.

But there is a broader trend that if companies can produce parts themselves, without relying on global suppliers, they’ll be in a stronger position to get their products to market with speed, growing scale and most importantly flexibility. As 3D printing overcomes obstacles to large-scale production, it will help companies gain market share, bring manufacturing closer to customers, win more business and increase customer satisfaction.

GS: The pandemic is going to have an impact on product development and manufacturing as a whole. It will accelerate key market trends that are core to our business such as:

1. Industry 4.0: The adoption of digital technologies have varied greatly across industries and company sizes. Traditional large organisations have been struggling to find a balance between existing operations and digital transformation of entire value chain.
2. Speed to market: We’ve produced over three million Covid-19 related components in the past month, and what has been underscored during this pandemic by those customers is that the ability to quickly move parts from design to production is essential. At Protolabs, the vast majority of parts we’ve made for these projects have been via our injection moulding service, as it’s the only service capable of producing the many thousands of parts needed in days. Our digital model enables us to produce large quantities of parts in as little as a day via a process that takes weeks to months from traditional vendors. From product developers’ standpoint, it is feasible that a similar urgency in bringing products to market will remain post-Covid-19. Protolabs will, as we’ve been doing for nearly 21 years, be ready to answer the call.
3. Value based supply chain: The current pandemic is not the only black swan event in recent history. We have seen several others including - financial crisis, Japan earthquake and tsunami and Thailand flooding that has impacted the supply chain in this global economy. Product manufacturers will have to rethink supply chain strategies in the long term to focus on value and risks and not just cost.