The House That the Smallpox Vaccine Built

Yesterday I paid a visit to Precision Medical Products, a contract manufacturer located in Pennsylvania. It has a state-of-the-art 106,000 sq ft facility opened in 2005. It enables the firm to perform just about every function needed for medical device manufacturing (except sterilization) in-house. You'd expect something like this from a large company, but PMP is relatively small compared to some of its competitors. So how were they able to pull it off? The story is very interesting.

November 21, 2007

1 Min Read
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A predecessor company had been the primary manufacturer of a special kind of needles used for the smallpox vaccine, until the disease was virtually wiped out in the 1970s. But after 9/11, bioterrorism concerns came to the forefront, and the U.S. government decided it needed safeguards against a potential smallpox outbreak. Indeed, it decided that it needed to stockpile one needle for every American citizen. So it went to PMP, and despite its small size, the firm figured out a way to manufacture and package 400 million smallpox needles over the course of a year.The revenues from that project enabled the firm to build its new facility and compete against larger competitors. And, says George Weaver, vice president of marketing, it continues to excel at figuring out how to develop manufacturing processes for projects that seem difficult. For example, a client that designed an ear thermometer which had a disposable part couldn't figure out how to make the disposable. PMP designed a manufacturing process for it from scratch, said Weaver. Much is written about the ingenuity of medical device companies, but what's often overlooked is that many times their supplier companies need similar ingenuity to succeed.

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