Birmingham medical companies join forces on product innovation

BLINK Medical has teamed up with fellow Birmingham firm Andel Plastics to produce a mould tool that will allow a device used in eye surgery to be made out of plastic instead of ‘traditional’ stainless steel.

The ‘Double Ended Marker’ is lighter, safer, and more cost effective to manufacture and could lead to considerable savings for the NHS and health organisations across Europe, the US and, potentially, the Far East.

Backed by strategic support from the Manufacturing Advisory Service (MAS), the new partnership will involve production of the instrument moving from China to Birmingham, creating three immediate jobs in the process.

It also strengthens the relationship between Blink Medical and Andel, with the latter recently investing nearly £70,000 in a new clean room to assemble specialist instrument packs for the medical sector.

Roger Tyler, managing director of Blink Medical, said: “We are continually looking at ways where we can bring innovation to the marketplace and recognised at an early stage that there was potential to consider plastic as a material instead of the traditional reliance on metal.

“This isn’t something we could do on our own and needed to seek the expertise of a plastic injection moulder, which is where Andel came into the equation.

“Tapping into MAS support to help with prototyping and development, we were able to successfully come up with a RP plastic surgical instrument that was more functional and cost effective to produce than its metal counterpart.

“We’ve just started to get our first orders and we expect to achieve sales approaching £100,000 during the next 12 months, with the promise of this ramping up considerably in the coming years.

“This is just the start and we’re already looking at how we can develop further innovations.”