A local medical components company that manufactures textiles used in sutures, heart stents and other medical procedures recently doubled the size of its operation in Warwick to accommodate strong growth of its business.
Biomedical Structures LLC has experienced double-digit growth since last year, as demand for its products has increased sharply, said John Gray, the company’s founder and president. Gray declined to discuss the revenue or sales of privately held BMS.
The company is a full-service contract manufacturer of permanent and absorbable implantable biomedical fabric structures. BMS engineers expensive fabrics used for hernia, spine, knee and shoulder repair as well as treatments for incontinence and cosmetic and reconstructive surgery, Gray said.
“We’re making a textile product that’s going to go into the human body,” Gray said.
BMS engineers use state-of-the-art and traditional textile machinery that has been retrofitted to braid, knit, weave and needle-punch non-woven materials used in some of the most innovative devices in the industry, Gray said.
The biomedical textiles made by the company range from the simple fabrics to highly complex three-dimensional, tubular and composite structures, he said. The textiles can be made from absorbable and non-absorbable fibers.
BMS also serves the growing tissue engineering industry with technologically advanced scaffolds for the regeneration of a wide variety of human tissue, such as cartilage, bone and organs, he said.
All BMS products are intended to be implanted surgically into humans.
Gray founded BMS in 2001, and moved the company to Warwick in January 2006 after outgrowing a manufacturing space that the company originally occupied in North Smithfield. The company occupies the entire building of a two-year-old, 10,000-square-foot manufacturing facility on Cypress Street – a facility ideal for the company’s manufacturing with the option of future growth, he said.
The company currently has 20 employees, and is expected to hire about 10 more workers within the next year, Gray said.
The company has worked since its inception to aid medical device manufacturers in their development of new products that employ biomedical fabrics, and several of those products have completed the long research-and-development and regulatory approval process and are now going to market, Gray said.
BMS works to understand the technology challenges of its customers, shepherding them through the various design and evaluation stages that occur during the development a new medical product – from inception, prototyping, clinical trials and ultimately recurring production, Gates said.
“Enough of our customer base has matured to the point of bringing these products to market,” he said. “A lot of the products – their volumes are going up considerably.”
Aside from that, BMS’ growth spurt is the result of several key factors, Gray said, including the company’s strong technology platform, superior relationships with its suppliers, and its protection of proprietary information and processes. •
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