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Medical device manufacturing in Central PA highlights future for piezoelectric technology startup

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The capacity of ceramic and other materials to change shape with changes in voltages also shapes the vision of Piezo Resonance Innovations, a new medical instrument design and manufacturing enterprise set to begin production in Central Pennsylvania this summer.

Piezo Resonance Innovations expects to receive ISO certification for manufacturing medical devices and for its risk management system for medical device development by this summer. The company received a Phase 1-B Small Business Innovation Award from the National Science Foundation last week, bringing total support from the NSF and National Institutes of Health to $250,000.  Also, support from Ben Franklin Partners of Central and Northern PA has funded salaries for the young company, which has also often relied upon advice from the Ben Franklin Transformation Group to navigate finance and marketing challenges it has overcome to reach this step in its development.

Those certifications for processes in which the company is already compliant will allow PRI to begin manufacturing its unique designs of medical instruments that use innovative motion to achieve better performance, says Maureen L. Mulvihill, the company’s founder. They also provide the foundation for its medical instrument manufacturing to grow in Central Pennsylvania, giving the enterprise more potential to develop as an industry and creating a different vision than that of other startups that seek to license new technologies to manufacturers located elsewhere.

A Pittsburgh native, Mulvihill says that the two-year-old company, which currently employs seven people, works closely with clinicians in the design and review of instruments for applications in critical care, eye surgery, minimally invasive surgery, and anesthesiology.

The company has 16 patent applications pending, which she characterizes as “huge for a company of our size” and critical to the business of developing and manufacturing instruments to license for distribution.

“We have a lot of actuation technologies that have not been tapped into in the medical field. When we show them to clinicians, they’re very interested,” she says.

Preparing for the start of manufacturing, Mulvihill says the company plans to hire three new employees over the next six months, engineers with backgrounds in bioengineering, mechanical engineering, and material sciences.

Source: Piezo Resonance Innovations, Maureen L. Mulvihill
Writer: Joseph Plummer
 
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