Company insight
Providing the coating that medical devices need
With customers ranging from individual doctors and small start-ups all the way to large international medical device firms, Formacoat has the experience and depth of knowledge to be beneficial to customers across the entire spectrum. But no matter the size of the company, Formacoat will be there to solve all of your coating needs.
elebrating its 20th anniversary this year and continuing to bridge that gap between medical device issues and coatings lays, Formacoat LLC is a contract manufacturer that specialises in commercial-production application of applied coatings to their customers’ medical devices as a custom service. “We don’t make or sell coatings, but we know and work with many different coating suppliers. Part of our service is to be able to parse the diverse field of coatings to help find the right coating for you and your medical device challenge” states Mark Gross, owner and CEO.
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Formacoat has the equipment, facilities, coatings, knowhow and expertise to solve any coating challenges. Even facing issues it has not handled before, its experience and creativity is always up to the challenge. The company coats all manner of OD, ID’s, stents, balloons, flat films, foils and mesh and complex shaped medical devices with a wide array of biomedical materials.
Formacoat uses 20 years of knowledge, experience and testing to find the best coating for your needs. If it happens that a particular coating does not work to your satisfaction, the team will apply what they’ve learned in the first experiments to choose different types of coating from one of their many other vendors. That means that you don’t need to teach someone about your device multiple times, as you would if you were going directly to several coating vendors. Not to mention these vendors are beholden to their own coatings and chemistries, meaning what they have might work okay, but the question remains: Is it truly the best solution for you? Does it functionally meet your needs? Does it match the needs of your substrate and device correctly? Does it financially match your needs? Formacoat’s approach allows it to streamline the entire process, making it a fast and efficient use of your time and money for your project. Formacoat regularly coat catheters, micro-catheters,
“Formacoat’s premise is that there are no bad coatings; it is just that one type of coating chemistry may work better for you than another.”
The right coat Formacoat’s premise is that there are no bad coatings; it is just that one type of coating chemistry may work better for you than another. Say you happen to be lucky (or skilled) enough in life to own both a Ferrari and a pick-up truck. Would you use your Ferrari to go to the lumber yard to pick up plywood? Of course not! While the Ferrari is an exquisite automobile, it would not be the right vehicle for that particular transportation need. Coatings are like this.
tubing, guidewires and film. Yet with its in-house tooling capabilities and seasoned staff of R&D engineers and chemists it has tackled a variety of odd geometric shapes, configurations and applications. It has the experience to coat anything you can dream!
All going smoothly
The most common request Formacoat encounter is for devices to be coated with hydrophilic coatings as a way to reduce friction. Hydrophilic coatings require water to activate the lubricity,
Medical Device Developments /
www.nsmedicaldevices.com
which in a typical surgical situation is very easy to do. In terms of friction, one may consider that hydrophilic coatings are in general one to two orders of magnitude less friction than many common medical device materials, even the typical Teflon (or other types of fluorinated surfaces). Formacoat has multiple vendors of hydrophilic coating technologies and chemistries.
What you need Formacoat’s objective has always been to provide an effective one-stop shop for small to large-scale commercial coating applications for a range of uses, including vascular, cardiovascular and implant delivery and devices like catheters, guide wires, stents and film roll-to-roll and tubing and wire/tubing reel to reel applications. It accomplishes this through its ‘solution’ approach to coating needs. It revolves around one simple idea: what do you want and why? This is known as the ‘Formacoat formula’. While this may seem like a basic concept, it is one that oftentimes can be overly complicated and even missed altogether. The answer to this seemingly simple question is incredibly important. Before Formacoat offers answers to your coating challenges utilising its 20 years of experience and variety of coating options, its important to know what you care about; what the customers who use your device care about. “By digging deeper and listening to our customer’s needs, we gain a better understanding that leads to improved results, sooner,” says Todd Paulsen, vice-president of Formacoat. “This saves our customers not only financially, but also in our customer’s most valuable commodity: time.” ●
www.formacoat.com 107
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