How Stryker is using 3D printing to advance orthopedics

Orthopedic device giant Stryker uses additive manufacturing to make porous geometries that wouldn’t otherwise be possible

DeviceTalks

3D printing, also called additive manufacturing, provides the ability to create new products and designs that are incredibly complex and hard to machine. For 20 years, Stryker has been on a journey to use additive manufacturing specifically to produce complex orthopedic implants. As a result, the company has made great strides when it comes to the way that orthopedic implants are designed and produced.

On a recent episode of our DeviceTalks Tuesdays webinar — sponsored by GE Additive, Foster, and Siemens — Stryker executive Naomi Murray detailed the company’s two-decade additive manufacturing journey. Murray, the company’s director of advanced operations for additive technology, described how innovations utilizing 3D printing make healthcare better.

Go to our sister site Medical Design & Outsourcing to read four takeaw…

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How Stryker is using 3D printing to advance orthopedics

Orthopedic device giant Stryker uses additive manufacturing to make porous geometries that wouldn’t otherwise be possible

DeviceTalks

3D printing, also called additive manufacturing, provides the ability to create new products and designs that are incredibly complex and hard to machine. For 20 years, Stryker has been on a journey to use additive manufacturing specifically to produce complex orthopedic implants. As a result, the company has made great strides when it comes to the way that orthopedic implants are designed and produced.

On a recent episode of our DeviceTalks Tuesdays webinar — sponsored by GE Additive, Foster, and Siemens — Stryker executive Naomi Murray detailed the company’s two-decade additive manufacturing journey. Murray, the company’s director of advanced operations for additive technology, described how innovations utilizing 3D printing make healthcare better.

Here are four takeaways on how additive manufacturing is advancing orthope…

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Leveraging the digital infrastructure to align with best practices and accelerate growth

Disruptive market conditions caused by COVID-19 pandemic, self-sufficient manufacturing policies, personalized medicine, value-based care and the new FDA and EU MDR updates have led Medical Manufacturers from large enterprises to small- and medium-sized businesses (SMB) to require a flexible digital infrastructure specific for the MD&D industry to increase speed-to-market, improve cost-efficiency, and maintain high quality necessary to achieve regulatory compliance. On this topic James Thompson, explains why digital infrastructure is leading the way in medical device manufacturing advancements and innovation.

How did COVID-19 change the MD&D Manufacturing Industry and which challenges did you face and how?

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted global supply chains on a monumental scale, therefore MD&D manufacturers had to quickly adapt and respond with an increased speed to market, while still managing the arduous process of regulatory appr…

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An inside look at GSK’s digital twin initiative

A GSK vaccine facility. Image courtesy of GSK.

Digital twins, functional computerized models of physical objects, are a staple of smart manufacturing. Their use in the pharmaceutical industry, however, is still in an early phase.

GlaxoSmithKline (LON:GSK) is one of the first pharmaceutical companies to announce a digital twin initiative. Partnering with Siemens (ETR:SIE) and Atos (EPA:ATO), GSK has created a real-time simulation of the entire vaccine manufacturing process.

A year in the making

The project, which launched a year ago, has already shown promise in reducing manufacturing timelines, optimizing product quality and other areas. The use of digital twins has enabled GSK to optimize vaccine-related experiments. “With digital twins, you’re able to do huge amounts of digital experiments and minimize the number of wet experiments that you do,” said Matt Harrison, head of sciences, digital innovati…

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The cultural shift to smart manufacturing for medical devices

Medical device manufacturers are experiencing unprecedented challenges. With the global pandemic negatively impacting markets, they are under pressure to produce increasingly complex products, quicker and at lower cost.

To remain competitive in this marketplace, manufacturers must move towards smart manufacturing to increase innovation and enhance processes. To take significant, actionable steps in manufacturing and production processes, enterprises must undergo a cultural shift in the way they use data.

Download this white paper on the 4 steps to achieve operational excellence.

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How 5G could affect medtech

The latest standard of broadband technology continues to make waves in 2021. But what about medtech?

 

Cellphone using 5G

Cellphone using 5G (Imagy by Frederik Lipfert on Unsplash)

Wireless tech companies such as Qualcomm are predicting download speeds as high as 10 gigabits per second as next-generation 5G cellular networks roll out worldwide.

The open question in medtech is how quickly companies will take advantage of the super-speedy connectivity for their own products.

“5G is about bringing more capacity and speed to the pipes,” said Don Jones, a member of the advisory council at BrightInsight and a veteran of the digital healthcare space. Jones spent more than 11 years building Qualcomm’s healthcare group.

“What you have to analyze is, ‘Can healthcare take advantage of what essentially amounts to these bigger pipes?’ Because more data can be shoved through them with m…

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These 5 medtech companies made it into the top 200 of Forbes’ best places to work list

Johnson & Johnson, Steris, Philips, Fujifilm Holdings and Boston Scientific were recently named among Forbes’ best large employers in America, based on feedback from their employees.

Forbes partnered with a market research firm to survey 50,000 Americans working for businesses with at least 1,000 employees. Survey participants were asked to rate their willingness to recommend their employer to friends and family and to nominate a business that wasn’t their own.

Get the full story on our sister site, Medical Design & Outsourcing.

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These 5 medtech companies made it into the top 200 of Forbes’ best places to work list

Johnson & Johnson, Steris, Philips, Fujifilm Holdings and Boston Scientific were recently named among Forbes’ best large employers in America, based on feedback from their employees.

Forbes partnered with a market research firm to survey 50,000 Americans working for businesses with at least 1,000 employees. Survey participants were asked to rate their willingness to recommend their employer to friends and family and to nominate a business that wasn’t their own.

Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ) ranked 84 out of the full list of 500. The New Brunswick, N.J.-based company has a 4.2 out of 5-star rating on the job board website Glassdoor. Johnson & Johnson, founded in 1886, employs over 132,000 people. Its medical device segment generated $25.96 billion in revenue in 2019.

Mentor, Ohio-based Steris (NYSE:STE) ranked 105 on Forbes’s list of the best large employers in America. The company has a 3.6 out of 5-star rating on Glassdoor. …

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Former Corindus CEO Toland joins robotic `micro’ surgical startup

Mark Toland, the former CEO of Corindus Vascular Robotics, believes the next big opportunity for surgical robotics is actually very small.

Toland, who sold the telesurgery robotics company to Siemens in 2019 for $1.1 billion, is now the CEO of Medical Microinstruments S.p.A. (MMI), an Italian company that has developed a surgical robotic system capable of performing microsurgery on capillaries, small vessels and other parts of the body existing robots – and maybe even surgeons – can’t reach.

“You see robotics companies that are trying to be the next Intuitive surgical or go after the laparoscopic surgery play,” Toland says. The objective “of this company is, `I want to create a field that doesn’t even exist today.’”

Founded in 2015 near Pisa, MMI in 2019 secured a CE-Mark for its Symani Surgical System to be used in open microsurgical procedures. The system already has been used in four surgical procedures in Florence, Italy including t…

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Siemens Healthineers secures EUA for its COVID-19 antibody test

Siemens Healthineers (ETR: SHL) announced today that it has secured an FDA emergency use authorization for its COVID-19 antibody test.

The news comes nearly a week after the German medtech giant said it had started worldwide shipments of the test — a laboratory-based total antibody test that can detect SARS-CoV-2 antibodies including IgM and IgG in blood. The company already has more than 1 million tests shipped to health systems and laboratories.

Antibody tests are an important tool as countries reopen their economies amid the COVID-19 pandemic: They can tell who has had the coronavirus in the past and hopefully developed some immunity. Siemens Healthineers, in fact, designed its Total Antibody COV2T assay to detect antibodies to the spike protein, which are believed to neutralize the SARS-CoV-2 virus and therefore prevent infection.

“As a leader in laboratory diagnostics, Siemens Healthineers designed a high-quality, highly accurate antibody test with …

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Siemens Healthineers to produce 50m antibody tests per month against COVID-19

Siemens Healthineers (ETR: SHL) said today that it has started worldwide shipments of its COVID-19 antibody test, with a goal of producing 50 million tests per month as the pandemic evolves.

The German medtech giant also announced that FDA has granted an emergency use authorization for its PCR Fast Track Diagnostics (FTD) SARS-CoV-2 Assay6 test kit.

Both types of tests are important: Antibody tests can tell who has had the coronavirus in the past and hopefully developed some immunity, while people need diagnostics tests to tell whether they are experiencing a COVID-19 infection right now.

Siemens officials say the company’s antibody tests demonstrate 100%  sensitivity (ability to exclude false negatives) and 99.8% specificity (few false positives) in identifying SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in as few as 10 minutes. The tests have a CE Mark in the EU, and Siemens is seeking an FDA EUA.

Siemens boasts that it has 20,000 systems worldwide to run the t…

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