Informa Informa’s Virtual Engineering Week took a deep dive into the impact of COVID-19 on medical technology and looked at the future of manufacturing.
Virtual Engineering Week, an all-new virtual event connecting the global medtech, automation, design, packaging, materials, plastics & sustainability, and product development communities, took place from November 30 – December 4. Organized by Informa Markets – Engineering, the producers of ATX, D&M, MD&M, PACK, PLASTEC, and Quality Expo, the virtual event offered best-in-class education with daily keynotes, expert panel discussions, and live Q&As amounting to more than 100 sessions, alongside a virtual expo, which included virtual product showcases and 160+ virtual booths. The event drew more than 7,400 registrants becoming Informa Markets – Engineering’s largest digital event to-date.
And with that, I ask the question for which this post is named:
“Can design controls accelerate medical innovation?”
While this question may seem out of place, there is logic to it. This logic is based on a 20-year observation brought to into focus with 2020 vision.
Innovation begins at the fuzzy front end of design, so that is where this journey begins. From this vantage point we can see significant hurdles. They are in front of us, and we clearly see them. We know that one day, down the road, we’ll need to produce our solutions under good manufacturing practices. We will have to do verification and validation testing to get there. We have a complex ecosystem to navigate with barriers to entry including market considerations, intellectual property, regulatory pathway to approval, and medical economics.
In Pursuit of More Sustainable Packaging Solutions Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay Medical device companies can make a difference when it comes to sustainability, according to a senior packaging engineer at Medtronic who spoke during Virtual Engineering Week.
In the Virtual Engineering Week session, “How to Make Medical Packaging More Sustainable,” Jennifer Griffin, senior packaging engineer at Medtronic, shared her recent visit to a tranquil fishing village along the Atlantic in Massachusetts. She spoke of noticing the still waters, when suddenly, the quiet was interrupted by a loud, rapid, pinging noise.
It was a seagull in a white rowboat, playing with a piece of plastic trash, picking it up in his beak and dropping it onto the hard surface of the boat and into the water. “He was purposely dropping it into the water and then retrieving it,” Griffin said. “I had never seen this behavior before. This looked like a child playin