Secant Medical LLC

Secant Medical will present at Rice University’s Advances in Tissue Engineering 2014 22nd Annual Short Course in Houston, August 13-16. Jeremy Harris, Ph.D., Technical Director at Secant Medical, will discuss how the company is scaling up poly(glycerol sebacate) (PGS) from academia to commercialization, along with the obstacles faced during the process, such as ensuring quality and consistency in every product batch. Help employers find you! Check out all the jobs and post your resume.

If you've ever seen a presentation by Michael Drues of Vascular Sciences (and you should), you'll know that one of the points he constantly hammers home is how medical device manufacturers don't take the intricacies of the human body enough into account when designing implantable devices. One of the examples he uses is that veins and arteries are curved and branch-like, yet stents, catheters and other devices that must be inserted into them are often of a fixed shape. This will naturally cause some stress on the affected cells -- and, potentially, adverse events. At MD&M West, Secant Medical, LLC (Perkasie, PA) is exhibiting a technology that could solve that problem. It has developed small vascular grafts that contain a stent inside, built into the structure and constructed with Nitinol, a metal with shape-memory capabilities. The graft materials and the Nitinol allow the stent to curve and twist in accordance with the actual shape of human veins and arteries. But, says Ryan Haniford, a Secant R&D engineer, the product has not caught on yet with the big stent companies. What are they waiting for?