The Manufacturing Technology Centre (MTC) and the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) has awarded funding to Warwickshire-based high technology business 3P Innovation, to aid the production of a new infection-cutting medical device and bring it into the market. The £35,000 funding is part of the IET Horizontal Innovation Programme for SMEs, and this programme is set to benefit the healthcare sector through the transfer of commercial innovation technology.
It is expected that this commercialised technology will help to solve some of the major challenges that the NHS is faced with on a day to day basis, with catheters that are currently used in UK hospitals resulting in 250,000 serious infections, 3,000 deaths and up to £500 million in health care costs each year. However, 3P Innovationâs work means that urinary tract infections can now be reduced by up to 50 per cent!
The business discovered that a small moulded valve that was being used whilst working on a novel catheter could be manipulated to address the issue of catheter-related urinary tract infections, and this award-winning method has been proven true and work will now be done to implement this concept into UK hospitals.
We plan to use the support through this programme to develop a production ready design and a manufacturing process for the medical device, commented Dave Seaward of 3P Innovation. Our novel medical device needs to be designed for high volume manufacture. We know that the detail of the product design will impact the ease, speed and costs of scale-up, and thereby the benefits to patients, society and the NHS.
This innovative development is set to be hugely beneficial for patients here in the UK, and we can only presume that more work like this will be on its way from 3P Innovation in order to gain similar results!
