Pivoting into the medical device industry

Managing director of Intertronics, Peter Swanson explains the company’s history and how it pivoted from a soldering tip distributor into an adhesives supplier to the medical device sector after Med-Tech Innovation recently visited the company’s Technology Centre.

Intertronics specialises in adhesives — including materials and technology — for the medical device assembly sector. This includes bonding, coating, sealing, encapsulating, potting, masking, and gasketing products, together with the most appropriate equipment and accessories for surface preparation, mixing, application, dispensing, and curing them. The company focuses on helping customers achieve productivity, quality, profitability, and, importantly, return on their investment (ROI). However, the business started out as a small supplier of soldering tips.

Can you tell me a bit about yourself, and how you founded Intertronics?

I was born across the Atlantic in New Jersey — my parents were both American. My father worked for a solder business called Alpha Metals, at that time a small family-owned company.

They started exporting to the UK, and in the early 1960s my father began travelling here, visiting, and supporting UK customers. Soon, he started bringing his young family with him. Over my childhood, we moved across the Atlantic seven times as a family, until we moved more permanently to London in 1970. I was grateful for a good education and was accepted to Jesus College at Cambridge University to read mathematics before switching to law. On graduating, after considering a further degree in business, I decided I was done with studying and explored the possibility of starting my own business.

At that point, the only industry I knew anything about (and then, not really very much) was electronics, as I had worked in my father’s office over some holidays. In those days, printed circuit board assembly factories often had lots of operators who were hand soldering. They were making TVs, VCRs and pagers, for example. I found a supplier of soldering iron tips that was slightly cheaper, and slightly longer lasting, than the market incumbents, and set off trying to sell them.

Why did you decide to pivot the business so drastically?

Intertronics grew slowly at first, but from 1982 to 2000, we started to grow consistently. We were servicing the printed circuit board assembly market with soldering, repair, and other consumable products. The UK and Ireland had many companies making high volume electronics, including large contract manufacturers like Solectron, SCI and Flextronics — and mobile telephone makers like Nokia, Motorola and Ericsson. But in the early 2000’s, there was a quite sudden market shift, as all these companies moved to locations like Eastern Europe, Mexico, and China.

With our main customers disappearing, we realised that a new strategy was needed. So, we decided to focus intently on a nascent part of our business, adhesives. We would be able to leverage our existing skills, and market ourselves in the same consultative way, but to a wider range of technology-based customers —including the medical device assembly sector, now one of our biggest.

How does the business support the medical device market today?

We are one of the UK’s most respected suppliers of materials and equipment to the technology and high-performance assembly industries. We have a team of 25, serving around 3,000 customers from our base in Kidlington, Oxfordshire.

We supply a range of products from our carefully selected supplier partners, who have shared values, excellent service and technical support, and synergies with each other. Alongside this, we have a growing range of our own adhere branded products.

Every adhesive application is unique, complex, and challenging. Choosing and evaluating an adhesive involves considering every aspect of the application, from design to production to processing, in line with the business’ priorities, like performance, productivity or process improvement. Because of this, medical device manufacturers look to specialists like us to support them with product selection and integration. This relationship works best as a long-term partnership that covers both current and future processes, rather than one based on the transactional supply of materials. We understand the culture and drivers of the medical device market, and we speak the language.

What major changes have you seen in the sector in that time?

Medical device manufacturers often use polymers and substrates we don’t see much in other industries. From PEBA or nylon 12 in catheter making, to COC or COP used in the assembly of in-vitro diagnostics (IVD), we need to have adhesives that bond to the specialist substrates of the sector.

Over the last few decades, the use of UV curable adhesives has grown significantly. Their introduction gave medical device manufacturers the ability to cure a material in seconds, on demand, facilitating a significant productivity boost. In addition, light curable adhesive processes are easy to measure, control, and validate — enabling much needed process repeatability and robustness to a highly regulated sector.

Over the years, there have been advances in UV curing materials. For example, novel adhesives for wearable devices formulated without known skin irritants, materials able to withstand sterilisation cycles, and dual curable cyanoacrylate adhesives. Alongside this, there has been a shift from mercury arc broad spectrum lamps to narrow spectrum LED UV lamps. To enable this, many adhesives have been formulated especially for LED UV curing. 

The industry is moving fast and there are an increasing number of adhesives available that have passed ISO 10993 tests. Training is available that covers the variables to consider when specifying materials and application equipment, and that helps build an understanding of the advantages and limitations of different adhesive technologies.