Photo opportunity: A look at the new National Healthcare Photonics Centre
The Centre for Process and Innovation (CPI), which is returning to Med-Tech Innovation Expo this year, officially opened the doors earlier this year on the National Healthcare Photonics Centre at NetPark in Sedgefield. Assistant editor Ian Bolland went along to the launch to have a look at the new facility.
Part of the function of the new facility will be to offer advice and assistance to companies who have designed and developed medical devices, and so they can be piloted. From the ideas stage of sketching out how one would like a device to look and function, the new centre will offer companies guidance on the road to commercialisation.
Tom Beale, commercial development manager, medtech told Med-Tech Innovation News: “What CPI can do that is possibly unique is not only help businesses from a technical sense but help them grow as well. We can offer them business advice in terms of where they are in their life cycle and what they need to look out for.
“There’s companies that we’ve supported within our other facilities where they’ve been working with us for five, six, seven years and they’ve actually grown as a company.
“They start up with us as one or two people, they grow and work within our labs but they take up another building within NetPark and they grow in that space as well. We help them grow and develop but we maintain that relationship with them.”
The new facility, which CEO Nigel Perry said he was ‘overwhelmed and gobsmacked’ by during his remarks at the opening, offers small companies the opportunity to work within the labs of the new centre.
In his speech, Perry said: “This National Healthcare Photonics Centre will add to our existing and emerging portfolio of healthcare-focused activities and better equip us to serve a broader range of organisations as we strive to support our vision of a healthier society enabled through the application of cutting-edge science and technology.
“The use of photonics to diagnose and treat medical conditions is one of the most exciting and highest impact applications of technology being explored in the world today. The field offers new approaches to address the growing global demand for non-invasive, cost-effective, and personalised treatments.”
On a tour of the facility, one room for manufacturing and assembly has the ability to work on up to four different products at a time – a room for a ‘mini-manufacturing line’. There is the opportunity for medtech firms that have just started out with one or two employees to oversee development from the offices in Sedgefield.
Beale was keen to mention that CPI can draw on resources away from the newly-built Photonics Centre before continuing its development at its new facility – citing conformable electronics for a wearable device, or for a drug delivery system there is the opportunity to work with CPI’s biologics facility in Darlington.
“We can pull from all of the different aspects of CPI, pull that all together to offer something fairly unique in terms of medtech and what we can supply.
“This facility is specifically developed for medtech development. We have other sites which are designed for other aspects.
“What we can do here is bring in what we’re able to do at other sites and bring that in to satisfy the demands of medtech in healthcare industries. One unique thing we have in healthcare photonics we don’t have in other parts of the CPI is our certified quality system to ISO 13485.
“What we are able to do within this facility is draw in expertise from other parts of the company as well.”
An example of a company that CPI has worked with across the facilities is HP1 Technologies. Its technology is designed to make sure equipment is fit for use and not compromised by damage which they believe in the short term is the best way to reduce injury, and that data generated in the longer term could prove valuable to medical research around head injury.
Beale added: “Using our printable electronics facility they’ve been printing pressure sensors in order to do this but all CPI were able to offer was the ability to print the pressure sensors. What we can now do in healthcare photonics that we couldn’t do before is integrate that into a product so we can now offer our 3D design and development facilities.
“That is of much bigger value and a much bigger benefit to that company.”
The Centre for Process Innovation will be exhibiting on stand J6.