Anaheim, Calif. — Medical manufacturers are seeing overall growth in the market as it continues to rebound from high levels of inventory from the COVID-19 pandemic and responds to new drug development from pharmaceutical customers.
Germantown, Wis.-based MGS Mfg. Group Inc. made significant investments in the last year to meet demand by pharmaceutical, diagnostic and medtech customers. It finished construction on its 118,000-square-foot innovation center at its campus in Germantown and invested in a new 300,000-square-foot injection molding facility in Richfield, Wis., to serve the pharmaceutical market.
MGS also expanded injection molding capacity at its Juarez, Mexico, health care manufacturing facility, adding secondary operations like packaging and ultrasonic welding, and expanded its facility in Leixlip, Ireland.
The new Richfield, Wis., plant will have "around 140 injection molding machines, plus numerous automation cells producing a drug delivery device for one client," Dirk Paulmann, vice president of global marketing at MGS, told Plastics News at MD&M West in Anaheim.
MGS is also establishing production in Costa Rica, Paulmann said. "We'll be seeing plastic parts falling out of machines this year."
"We have converted our Mexican operation into a 100 percent health care-certified clean room production location," Paulmann said. "Inside that scope of health care … we're able to offer end-to-end solutions.
"There's more demand in the [pharmaceutical delivery] market than supply right now, so creating manufacturing resources scaling is important to our customers," Paulmann said. "If the drugs that are in the pipeline take off in the way everybody expects them to, there will be a shortage of supply of devices.
"We're trying to follow that trend," he added. "On the device side, there is a trend for making devices even more intelligent, integration of electronics, integration of motorized movements, capabilities of monitoring stuff on your mobile phone or exchanging data with health care professionals."
MGS' product design and development team in Denmark has about 150 "experienced and dedicated engineers only doing product design and development for health care," Paulmann said. "After that, it goes into tooling. We have all the tooling in-house, with about 250 people working on the tooling side."
The company has tooling capabilities in Denmark, Sweden and its headquarters in Wisconsin.
"We are developing our own IP around a drug delivery platform, an auto injector," Paulmann added. "So, not too far out in future, there will be an MGS auto injector — our own product. That will be the next step."
Leominster, Mass.-based Beacon MedTech Solutions had a "record month" of bookings for medical device products in December 2024, James Colony, company president, told PN at the show. Much of the revived demand, Colony said, is "in single-use technology for biopharmaceutical. We have a lot of new opportunities in medical devices. Aerospace and commercial is flat."
Two years ago, Beacon MedTech's sales "were probably 40 percent medical. … Now we're over 60 percent [medical]," Colony said. That increase in demand "broadens our capabilities."
"We've developed quite an expertise now in liquid silicon rubber," he said. "We're finding a lot of opportunities where we combine that with plastic injection molding for thermoplastics."
Beacon MedTech's clean room is "busier" these days, Colony said. "It's leading to a lot of verticalization of products, with molding and assembly. … We're seeing a lot more quotes that will come in for a silicone part, and then people find out we do assembly, and that leads to a broader project. We're very good at projects that have multiple components."
While the contract manufacturer keeps a portfolio of big, established customers, Colony said, it also sees startup companies as a crucial part of its customer base.
Startups "are what made this company," he said. "We want to make sure that we have several of those going in our portfolio. And hopefully, one out of three really take off."