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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Area Medical Device Makers Craft Innovative Products

Local medical device makers in the Valley region have been busy producing innovative products the past couple of years — products aimed at increasing efficiency for health care providers and patients. Some of the companies even claim to be the first in the United States to launch their products. Medtronic Diabetes, a business division of Minneapolis-based Medtronic Inc., is the greater San Fernando Valley region’s largest medical device manufacturer with about 1,800 local employees. Some of the latest innovations include new products for diabetes, post-organ transplant diagnostics and medical lighting. The company launched its Revel insulin pump in March 2010, which is an upgrade from its last pump model, said Dr. Francine Kaufman, Medtronic Diabetes’ vice president of clinical and medical affairs. Kaufman is also the company’s chief medical officer. The new pump, which is designed to use continued glucose monitoring, offers more controlled insulin delivery than its predecessor, allowing for smaller delivery amounts, company officials said. It also alerts users at least 30 minutes before glucose levels become low. Medtronic launched the pump’s CareLink 3.0 software in December, Kaufman said. The software stores data for both the Revel pump and the glucose center in order to supply glucose level analytics, she said. “Our sensor augmented pump system, supported by CareLink, is the most advanced system that’s available in the United States, where it brings the sensor and the pump together,” she said. “There’s been a lot of enthusiasm from patients and health care providers as to how much that added information really enables their job to be easier.” Medtronic Diabetes is also in the process of developing an artificial pancreas that enables automated insulin delivery, Kaufman said. Despite the company’s recent product advancements, it announced plans to eliminate 468 jobs at its Northridge diabetes headquarters due to overall market challenges. Testing One Lamda, a Canoga Park-based company that specializes in testing technology related to organ transplants, has been taking a new direction with its products, said Stewart Han, the company’s marketing director. “Our emphasis in the last couple of years has really been in the area of post-transplant monitoring,” Han said. The company traditionally focused on producing tests that helped determine, before a transplant, whether a patient’s body would accept or reject an organ, he said. The company now also has tests for determining the likelihood of a rejection after a transplant occurs. “It gives the clinician more time to come up with the options of how they’re going to treat a rejection episode,” Han said. “They’re still in a reactive mode, but now they’ve got more time.” Over the past couple of years, the company also launched products to help labs with high-volume testing requirements to process samples faster, he said. Lighting San Fernando-based Medical Illumination — which manufactures surgery, exam and specialty lights — said it is producing products that support major changes occurring in the lighting industry. Medical Illumination is helping supply the medical industry’s move to the use of LED (light-emitting diode) and HID (high intensity discharge) lighting, said Larry Debord, the company’s vice president of sales and marketing. The medical industry’s transition lags behind other industries, because it has more complex needs for such lighting, he said. Medical Illumination is not the only company providing LED lighting to medical clients. However, Debord said his company is the only one in the U.S. manufacturing HID surgery lights. HID lighting is not as popular as LED lighting, he said, but it is highly efficient. “We applied a tremendous amount of resources toward (these technologies) recognizing that this is the future,” Debord said. The company has completed about half of its transition to the new types of lighting, he said. The rest of the region’s largest medical device manufacturers cover a wide span of specialties. Some make implantable devices, and some make diagnostics systems. Others make components that are used in other medical devices. Quallion in Sylmar, for example, makes lithium ion cells and battery packs for the medical industry, which makes up about a third of its business. Over the past decade, the company has been developing products that reduce charge time and frequency, said Joseph Morotta, Jr., vice president of Quallion’s Medical Power Group. Download the 2011 SFV’s MEDICAL DEVICE MAKERS list (pdf)

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