Custom molder Injectronics Inc. is opening its first manufacturing plant dedicated to the medical industry.
The small plant, in Westborough, Mass., is about 15 miles from the firm's Clinton, Mass., headquarters, and will have capacity for six injection presses in a Class 100,000 clean room, said President Paul Nazzaro. The 12,000-square-foot facility will open in June with two presses in a fully automated production cell.
The company does about $8 million a year in medical industry sales, a fraction of its $65 million total sales, he said. Much of the firm's other work is in automotive, but the company said it wants to grow health care to 35 percent of corporate sales by 2008.
``We've got some growth with an existing customer and we've got some new business we're hopeful to get,'' Nazzaro said. ``What we're trying to do is segregate the health-care work in its own facility.''
The company is spending about $1 million on the expansion.
The firm will do high-volume, clean-room work in medical disposables in Westborough, and will continue to do medical-device molding such as components for defibrillators and patient monitoring equipment in Clinton, he said.
Before the company's push into the automotive market in the 1990s, the 36-year-old firm did about half of its work in health-care molding.
The new plant will start with 15 employees. Injectronics hopes it will be up to six presses and 40 employees within two years, Nazzaro said.
The leased facility is the company's fourth injection molding plant. Its medical customers include Ethicon Endo-Surgery Inc., Agilent Technologies Inc., Cytyc Corp. and Genzyme Surgical Products.