Medical Device Suppliers Unite to Form the WCDA

Throughout the past few years, a significant number of mergers and acquisitions in the medical device supplier’s space have occurred. The consolidation has created headwinds for some of the smaller companies in the market making it more difficult to compete.

Earlier this month, during MD&M West, five suppliers in the medical device industry, as a response to the mass consolidation efforts in the industry, formed the West Coast Device Alliance (WCDA).

Roy Morgan, president and CEO of Eagle Medical, spoke to MD+DI about the impetus behind the WCDA.

“The impact these consolidations have in our industry has to do with the power of brand recognition that these large multi-national conglomerates can create,” Morgan told MD+DI. “They have the marketing budgets and the advertising budgets that are of such scale that they can eclipse other players in the marketplace. It creates this … bright light in the industry that makes it hard for smaller players to achieve this sort of brand awareness.”

The founding members of the WCDA are Eagle Medical, specializing in FDA-compliant assembly, packaging, and in-house Hydrogen Peroxide Gas Plasma (HPGP) specific sterilization; West Pak, a 3rd-party, independent-laboratory specializing in package validation and product testing; Pacific BioLabs, a contract research organization specializing in microbiology, services for living organisms in vivo as well as analytical chemistry and cell-based bioassay culture samples in vitro for the medical device and pharmaceutical industries; Blue Line Sterilization Services, ethylene oxide sterilization services, and Steri-Tek, a high-volume E-beam and X-ray contract sterilizer as well as R&D innovation center.

“The simple virtue of combining many different types of businesses with the clarity of end-to-end provision for product realization in the medspace … you’re able to give the uninitiated in our industry a sense of clarity of pathway,” Morgan said. “When you’re one component in that landscape like an Eagle, Pacific BioLabs or WestPak, as the independents are that are part of this WCDA, it is more difficult to work with the uninitiated in our industry to give them that same degree of clarity. A big part of why we wanted this was to educate each other and give each other that same level of clarity of pathway.”

There’s potential for more companies to join but that’s definitely in the future Morgan, noted.

“A membership aspect of the WCDA is definitely in the cards,” he said.