Meeting increased demands for COVID-19 tests and PPE will be among 2021’s most formidable challenges for medical device manufacturers, shares Kevin Young, vice president of corporate development & medical for Web Industries.

“This is a defining moment for makers of PPE and medical devices,” Young says. “We are facing government agencies’ mandates for products that will help save lives and put the country back to work. We have a national imperative to succeed, one that will call into play needs for adaptability and foresight. 

“Based on early comments from the new administration, for example, onshoring is likely to play a major factor in the 2021 plans of many medical device companies," he continues. "They will need to pull manufacturing from offshore and make or at least assemble products in the U.S., including COVID-19 tests that will experience accelerating demand as the FDA approves point-of-care and at home testing. Medical device OEMs as well as manufacturers of PPE, such as masks, aprons, and curtains, will need to either set up production domestically or turn to a CMO like Web Industries to enable domestic manufacturing. Typically, a CMO can gear up for production in approximately four months versus more than a year for OEMs."

He reports that Web Industries is scaling manufacturing capacity at facilities in Fort Wayne, IN, and Boston to support OEMs’ production-quantity, delivery, and regulatory demands. The company is also "building additional capacity to support the next wave of serology test devices necessary to test the efficacy of vaccines that are coming into the market,” he says.