Medical Plastics News spoke to Kevin LaDow, medical products manager USA West, Junkosha, about the company's peelable heat shrink tubing and PTFE liners.
You’re best known for your Peelable FEP Heat Shrink Tubing, could you tell us a bit about it?
We are the inventor of the peelable heat shrink tubing solution; not many other companies have developed a similar product with the same attributes and benefits.
Across the market, many organisations are moving away from other types of heat shrink like the traditional non peelable FEP's. However, people still run into the same issues with the product where you have to skive it off the catheter. Junkosha’s innovation is not only innovative; it enables end users the ability to peel away the heat shrink without the need for a blade.
Overall, everyone wants to get away from using blades and have a more reliable way to remove the heat shrink from their device.
What other issues can occur that you’re trying to overcome?
Everyone's having supply chain issues, especially for fluoropolymer products like peelable heat shrink tubing and PTFE liners. One thing that we are taking very seriously right now is scaling up our capacity to try to help organisations as best we can, not only in the short term, but in the long term as well.
We have a lot of new capacity coming online to support these products, including the commissioning of a new plant in 2025. We’re excited to be scaling up and to be helping people in these turbulent times.
What are the benefits of your shrink tubing?
It's more ergonomic - if you can imagine a small catheter whereby you need to skive a very thin layer of tubing off the outside, it is a huge challenge. Not having to go anywhere near your device with a blade is a great benefit, but also there's a yield factor as well because if you slice any of the underlying layers with the blade, you have got to throw the whole catheter away and start over.
It's definitely advantageous especially in a high-volume operation where you're making hundreds of thousands of catheters a year. If you have 50% yield, you're losing a lot of stock, which will cost organisations both time and money.
This skiving step is usually at the very end of your catheter lamination process, so you've already added the liner, the braiding and the outer jacket; the purpose of the peelable heat shrink solution is to laminate all of the underlying substrates together into one single catheter. Having the ability to peel this outer layer away from the catheter improves yields, which is a significant benefit for the OEM.
What can you tell me about your PTFE liners?
There's a couple of options in the market for PTFE liners. Some people like to use a dip coated or a dispersion type PTFE Liner. We are focusing on a RAM extruded PTFE solution. Ultimately, there's a lot of performance differences between those two types of liners.
The RAM extruded liner gives you much higher tensile strength, as well as better tensile properties which is important for catheter builds. A lot of people like to use dip coated or dispersion liners, because they’re very thin and can offer more flexibility.
However, we're providing solutions that enable OEMs to manufacture thinner catheter designs, so they are not only getting the benefit of the increased tensile strength but also the ability to provide smaller form catheters for more intricate procedures.