Company insight
Smaller and smarter medical devices
As part of its ongoing endeavour to expand its global footprint and grow its capabilities to better serve customers, Alleima recently acquired the German based company Endosmart. We look at some of the exciting innovations that these nitinol experts are bringing to the medical industry but also how Alleima envisions the merge creating new, ground-breaking products to the MedTech industry.
ndosmart took shape 20 years ago after CEO and founder Dr Bernd Vogel researched nitinol as part of his final thesis as a mechanical engineer. Two of Vogel’s professors at university had seats at the Karlsruhe Research Institute (KIT), where he was a researcher and leader of the Smart Material Development Group focusing on nitinol. They were working with a German company on a steerable endoscope that could be deflected up to 90°. To finish his master’s academic work, Vogel’s challenge was to design a hingeless version, meaning a tube that was slotted from one side to make it steerable. To avoid hinges, they needed an extremely elastic material with a diameter of 10mm. That tubing material didn’t exist, so Vogel made a tube out of a nitinol sheet, structured the tube with a laser, and integrated a push/pull wire. The result was the first deflectable chip on the tip of an endoscope. It gave surgeons a completely new vision of the operating field and, soon, the demand for samples from medical device companies grew, and Endosmart was born.
E
The miniaturisation of medical devices and making them “smart” requires ultra-fine wire components. Experts in nitinol
Nitinol is an alloy renowned for unique properties, namely shape memory, biocompatibility and super elasticity. The products Endosmart has brought to Alleima include surgical instruments and components, such as kidney stone
“I’ve been married two times: to my wife and to nitinol! Everybody in the nitinol community sticks with this field because it’s so fascinating and there are so many opportunities.”
Dr Bernd Vogel
“You could say that’s when I fell in love with nitinol. I’ve been married two times: to my wife and to nitinol! Everybody in the nitinol community sticks with this field because it’s so fascinating and there are so many opportunities,” says Vogel.
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retrieval baskets, snares and breast cancer tumour markers.
The company primarily operates in
urology, oncology and cardiology fields, as well as instruments for orthopaedic and vascular applications. It stands out from
the competition with its development capabilities, its patenting landscape so that customers can be assured that their designs are safe, and its extensive expertise with nitinol. In addition to all this, the company’s team of engineers have in-depth medical knowledge and an understanding of what surgeons need. This enables them to translate the surgeon’s requirements into the development phase of new medical devices. But what is the coolest product that has been developed yet? “At this date, it would be the tipless retrieval devices integrating innovative guidewire technology to stabilise the device,” Vogel explains. “With the first iteration of the device, sometimes things happened that the surgeon customers couldn’t explain.” “I went into the operating room several times until I understood what the surgeon was doing and realised what could happen, which is something I never could
Medical Device Developments /
www.nsmedicaldevices.com
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