The owners of PM Plastics Inc., Benjamin Harp and Tom Rybicki, have launched a new business, Polymer Medical Inc., to supply the health care and bioscience markets with medical disposables and devices, following decades of experience founding and operating medical plastics manufacturers.
Polymer Medical will have "its own identity," Harp, president of Polymer Medical, told Plastics News in an interview, to "specialize in the technical expertise customers are asking for."
Harp and Rybicki purchased Orchard Park, N.Y.-based PM Plastics, an injection molding and thermoforming supplier, in March 2022.
They upgraded the company's plant over the last two years and "spent a great deal of time with customers," Harp said, to "round out" the company's services and talent.
Both men were executives at medical plastics company Polymer Conversions Inc., which is now part of Medbio LLC. Harp was president and Rybicki was operations director. Harp also worked in resin sales for General Polymers early in his career.
PM Plastics serves every plastics industry market except medical, Harp said.
"We thought it was time, with our collective 50 years of experience in this space, to not ignore [the medical market]," he said.
"A lot of injection molders say they're in medical," he said, "but they're not committed to it because they do work for automotive or some other industry sectors. … Having the experience we do, it requires a certain culture, a certain technical expertise."
Harp and Rybicki purchased a 5,000-square-foot mixed-use, light-manufacturing building in Orchard Park, N.Y., on March 15 and have been outfitting the facility with a clean-room environment, Harp said.
The facility's manufacturing floor has space for eight new injection molding presses, three of which will be installed the week of April 15, he said.
"We expect to make our first part before the end of [April]," he said.
"There's a rising demand for medical devices partly because of changes in demographics and approaches to home health care," Harp said in an April 9 news release. "Our knowledge of the specifications and science of producing polymers for health care and bioscience … give us a competitive edge."
"When a client comes to us, we'll provide design for manufacturing analysis to offer ways to improve on what they're already trusting us to make," Rybicki said in the release. "When we take an order from a customer, we assess their tool, or mold, for those big or small things that could disrupt production. That saves money for the customer and ensures quality."
Polymer Plastics currently has five employees, Harp added. The company expects to add about 10 more employees to its team by 2025.
It will produce drug-delivery systems, medical disposables such as syringes, medical devices for home health care to orthopedics, specialty packaging and pharmaceutical disposables. It will also offer in-house tool building, tool transfer, product enhancement and finished medical device assembly.
The new company invested in quality management systems, in part, to meet ISO 13485:2016 standards for medical devices, the release said. Its employees will produce customers' designs in ISO-7 and ISO-8 clean manufacturing environments.