World’s Largest Technical Plastics Conference Dedicates Afternoon to Medical Plastics

The Society of Plastics Engineers (SPE) has earmarked an entire afternoon of its upcoming flagship technical conference, Antec, to medical plastics. Antec will be held in Cincinnati, USA, on April 22-24, 2013.

The title of the session is New Technology Forum on Polymers in Health. The contents have been compiled thanks to a joining of forces between the SPE’s Medical Plastics Division, the Engineering Properties and Structures Division and the New Technology Committee.

Of the topics to be discussed will be exciting applications made possible with their use. The session will look at how innovation is being done using novel polymers and how the frontiers of regulatory agencies are being challenged and redrafted based on emerging polymers and new applications.

On the subject of resorbable polymers, Medical Plastics News asked Len Czuba, former president of the Medical Polymers Division, to recount the most impressive medical plastic technology he’d seen in recent times. The editorial team were glad to hear his response was about a device we had earmarked as a landmark development in the industry —Abbott’s brand new fully resorbable Absorb polymer stent. The stent was approved for sale in Europe last year while clinical trials in the USA began in January 2013.

Absorb is a drug eluting fully bioresorbable vascular scaffold for the treatment of coronary artery disease, which is a narrowing of one or more arteries that supply blood to the heart. Absorb is made of polylactide (PLA), a naturally dissolvable material that is commonly used in medical implants such as dissolving sutures. Absorb works by opening a clogged vessel and restoring blood flow to the heart similar to a drug eluting metallic stent, the current standard of care. Absorb then dissolves into the blood vessel, leaving behind a treated vessel that may resume more natural function and movement because it is free of a permanent metallic implant.

James Oberhauser, polymer R&D manager at Abbot Vascular, will be presenting a paper entitled The Application of Bioresorbable Polymers to Vascular Medical Devices at the Polymer Applications in Health session at Antec along with Boston Scientific and 3M. At the time of going to press, in addition to James’s presentation, the preliminary line-up was as follows: Putting Electrospun Nanofibres to Work for Biomedical Research, by Younan Xia of Georgia Tech; Resorbable Polymers: Melt Processing, by Larry Thatcher of TESco Associates; Differentiating Biological Response to DES Polymers, by Barbara Huibregtse, biotechnology director at Boston Scientific; Value Driven Engineering and US Global Competitiveness, by Frank Douglas; and Global Regulatory Guidelines for the Design and Development of Medical Devices, by Scott Sardeson, international regulatory manager at 3M.