Secant Medical Receives Award for Implantable Textiles

Secant Medical has been awarded the 2012 North American Frost & Sullivan Award for Enabling Technology based on the company’s contribution to the implantable textile structures design market. Established in 2002 as a business unit within Prodesco Inc. (part of Fenner PLC), Secant develops biomedical textiles technologies, and is one of the few suppliers that can provide customized design solutions at competitive prices to medical device manufacturers and other notable clients in the biomedical device industry.

The Frost & Sullivan Award is awarded each year to companies that not only have developed a pioneering technology, but whose technology also promises to aid in the development of further, newer technologies. In addition, the award recognizes the high market acceptance potential of a technology.

In a laudatory statement announcing the award, Secant is described as a company able to combine variability in structure, delivery method, performance, physical composition, resorbability, and other unique elements that make up implantable textile construction. The company’s customized approach enables medical device manufacturers to develop a portfolio of more innovative, effective, and commercially successful medical device designs.

“There is an emerging industry need to completely understand the role that material selection plays in realizing component structure design, optimizing the development process, and largely defining the form and function of the end device,” said Prasanna Vadhana Kannan, senior research analyst at Frost & Sullivan. “One of the unique approaches adopted by Secant Medical toward design methodology is its ability to understand the medical device design requirements and leverage its technology to create a customized solution for the client’s device application.”

A combination of established and emerging substrates, along with a carefully structured material selection process, offers an effective path toward enhancing the performance of a medical device design. In line with this trend, Secant Medical is focused on advancing textile constructs built from absorbable and bio-active polymers for tissue engineering and orthobiologics applications that require short-term tissue support while the body repairs itself, followed by long-term biologic integration.

The company’s approach also will enable niche applications for biomedical textiles. For instance, Frost & Sullivan expects that in the near future, spinal applications will benefit from woven structures that contain reinforced holes for screws and other fixative components used for attaching to a bone plate. In effective filtration-involving applications, weaving with wires and other biomaterials paves the way for more open constructions that have highly controlled pore sizes for capturing emboli, while at the same time allowing normal blood flow through the material. Such prospects of woven biomedical textiles are useful in surgical techniques involving high-stroke patients. As such, the potential for Secant’s technology is far-reaching.

“Another crucial capability in woven biomedical textiles is the ability to provide vital properties by altering or modulating the geometry of the structures and the materials from which they are produced,” noted Kannan. “Secant Medical is working toward textile components engineered from materials designed to degrade at varying rates over time, thereby allowing the ability to fine-tune fabric degradation in sync with the desired tissue healing rate of the patient.”

Secant has formed strategic partnerships with leading biomaterial providers to boost innovation in the orthopedics segment involving tissue engineering, tissue scaffolding, and orthobiologics concepts. The firm realizes that with a seemingly endless need to customize materials and form technologies to suit new device applications, investing in biomedical textiles research and development will accelerate innovation and advance medical technologies available for surgical procedures. This foresight was cited as a further reason that made Secant worthy of this year’s Frost & Sullivan Award.

Frost & Sullivan is a New York, N.Y.-based company that partners with companies from various industries to aid in growth and innovation. Frost & Sullivan Best Practices Awards recognize companies in various regional and global markets for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service, and strategic product development.

Perkasie, Pa.-based Secant Medical combines implantable biomaterials with medical fabric engineering technologies to develop the next generation of biomedical textile components for medical devices.