Zeus investing $91.9 million to expand in South Carolina

Anaheim, Calif. —​ Zeus Industrial Products plans to invest $91.9 million and hire 370 more employees at two of its facilities in South Carolina.

The Orangeburg, S.C.-based components manufacturer also has launched a new series of extremely thin-walled liners extruded from polytetrafluoroethylne (PTFE) that it says will advance catheter designs to improve patient care.

The closely held business has not disclosed what's driving the need to add 148,000 square feet of manufacturing space and 350 workers in Gaston, S.C., but hiring is underway for some positions. That $76 million expansion won't be completed until 2019.

Zeus also will invest $15.9 million and add 20 employees to its existing operations in Orangeburg, where plans call for a 64,000-square-foot expansion to centralize engineering and offer tooling design, parts fabrication, tooling production and machine assembly.

Founded in 1966, Zeus sells tubing, wires and fibers to the medical, automotive, electrical and fiber optics markets. Its latest innovation: PTFE liners with a maximum wall thicknesses of 0.00075 inches (0.01905 mm) for the very inner part of catheters.

Called StreamLiner XT, this is the thinnest extruded PTFE liner available, Zeus' material scientist Irina Roof said at the Medical Design & Manufacturing West trade show, held Feb. 6-8 in Anaheim.

"This is about half the thickness of the traditional legacy products on the market," Roof said of the recently launched ultrathin product.

The series also contains StreamLiner VT, which is slightly larger with a maximum wall thickness of 0.001 inches (0.025 mm).

Zeus developed PTFE tubing with superthin walls in 1968 for a division of Johnson & Johnson, which was one of its first medical customers. The company's business model has long been to collaborate with customers on special extrusions.

Fast forward 40 years and Zeus is reducing the thickness of the base liner of catheters to help its customers design and manufacturer microcatheters with increased inner diameters and reduced outer diameters. The resulting medical devices will allow doctors to access smaller, more remote vasculatures and anatomies.

"This innovation will help catheter manufacturers advance their technology," Zeus spokesman Billy Williams said at MD&M West. "It was definitely customer-driven. Medical device manufacturers let us know what will help them and everyone is looking to go thinner."

Catheters have increasingly complex constructions. The PTFE liners are enclosed with a thin, braided reinforcement of stainless steel for strength, pushability and tractability. The braiding is covered with a nylon jacketing for flexibility, and that has a peel-off FEP heat shrink wrap to protect the outer shaft.

By increasing the catheter lumen space and decreasing the overall profile, Zeus is enabling device manufacturers to design smaller, more functional devices for navigating the body, particularly during minimally invasive surgical procedures for cardio and neurovascular patients.

The catheters could be used as guidewires to accurately route a surgical instrument or deliver a device, such as a balloon to open a blood vessel, for procedures like angioplasty to restore blood flow, ablation to treat cardiac tissue and atherectomy to remove fatty deposits in arteries. A Zeus slideshow depicts a StreamLiner winding through the tortuous twists and turns of a model of the internal carotid artery, which supplies blood to the brain.

Zeus was one of a handful of businesses highlighted on an MD&M innovation tour. The company's thinnest PTFE base liners looked like stiff strands of hair as Roof held them up.

"Imagine threading something through this opening in order to deliver a device or perform a diagnostic procedure. With that said, lubricity is critical," Roof told the group.

Sufficient lubricity means less force is needed to deploy the device and a greater likelihood for a successful procedure. Liners made from the fluoropolymer material have exceedingly smooth inner surfaces that allow catheter technologies, such as stents and balloons, to be pushed through the tight channels.

Zeus is promoting StreamLiner by urging customers to "change your liner, not your process."

"With the StreamLiner series, a catheter manufacturer can almost keep their same process yet gain that extra space on the inner part of the catheter channel," Williams said.

Zeus is also out with a new liquid crystal polymer monofilament designed to perform similarly to stainless steel but be compatible for magnetic resonance imaging.

"It's going to be a significantly higher price point than stainless steel, but there are a lot of benefits," Williams said. "The safety aspect is key."

Zeus currently has more than 400,000 square feet of manufacturing space and 23 clean rooms at nine facilities in the United States, Europe and Asia, employing about 1,300.