Plastic in the Medical Device Industry

Environmental stress cracking is a common cause of unexpected brittle failure of thermoplastic polymers leading to cracks and crazes, and product failure. It is estimated that it counts for 15-30% of all plastic failures during service. It typically happens to amorphous thermoplastics under tensile stress or strain subjected to chemicals from the surroundings.
This work sets up relevant design criteria for specific amorphous thermoplastics in order to build in robustness towards environmental stress failures instead of only relying on tests. The work can easily be transferred to other polymers, chemicals and strains.

Nicklas Funk will speak about Ambu’s journey with implementing practices and design principles in Global Innovation to design for a circular economy. This will give you insight into their motor for focusing and scaling sustainable innovation, as they are looking into running 30 development projects in parallel. Results with speed, cross-functional collaboration and integrity will be the key factors for success and prosperity across their broad portfolio of products within markets of ‘Visualization’, ‘Anastasia’, ‘Patient Monitoring and Diagnostics’.

Via the Triple Bottom Line, environmental stewardship has always been a part of the Novo Nordisk DNA. However, in early 2019 a new and updated environmental strategy was launched with the title ‘Circular for Zero’ taking the next steps into sustainability of business operations, R&D, production and treatment of diabetes and other chronic conditions. With inspiration from The Ellen MacArthur foundation renewed focus was put on their use of materials for medical devices among many other aspects.
In the presentation, Jesper Bøgelund will speak about how they have tried to translate the abstract ideas of a circular economy into concrete and doable actions in their early-phase device R&D projects.

In this presentation Etienne Perrony will discuss the structure and chemistry of thermoplastic elastomers, explain the compounding process and go through the main features and measurements of TPEs, including regulatory aspects. With the increased use of over-molding in healthcare applications Etienne Perrony will give details of this process and the associated benefits, concluding with a discussion on TPEs in comparison to rubber.

The ambition for the new sustainable materials being introduced into the LEGO elements is not to compromise the safety, consumer-perceived quality and durability. Pursuit of durable products are both of importance in high-quality toys and medico alike.
The focus in this presentation will be on polyesters that are known to undergo hydrolysis, physical ageing and photo-oxidation, identifying and extrapolating the influence of each individual degradation mechanism into a material criterion.

Especially in the beginning of the corona crisis, the benefits of plastics in healthcare were obvious to anyone. But now it has become apparent that the corona pandemic paradoxically has given renewed impetus to criticism of plastic – and this time, healthcare plastic is the main culprit.
The presentation covers the following key points:

• Plastics in healthcare – figures and applications
• Why PVC is king in medical plastics
• Corona virus – new PVC applications and more waste
• Recycling of PVC-based medical devices – case stories
• Barriers to recycling

How can surface modification help fight Covid-19?
Learn how surface modified polymer products can be employed in the global fight against Covid-19; from growth of airway epithelial cells to PCR- or antibody testing and 3D cell culture vaccine models.
We will be investigating polymers modified by gamma irradiation, plasma treatment and wet chemical processes.

Medical devices are mostly made of polymers and must be able to administer a drug safely otherwise the health of the patients is threatened. Tribology is an important factor in a device as too low/high friction or wear can decrease the dose accuracy.

In the case where the patient has to dose manually, low friction is also a question of convenience. Many medical devices are produced in millions and mostly very simple polymers are used. This challenges the robustness with regards to tribology in every one of the devices.

The present talk will introduce the basics of polymer friction and wear and present some of the solutions to tribological challenges encountered in Novo Nordisk Device R&D.