There’s no shortage of great ideas running through the SME community in Scotland. The problem is that innovation must be backed with resources.

The inauguration of the Medical Device Manufacturing Centre (MDMC), based at Heriot-Watt University (HWU), is hopefully a big step in helping Scottish SMEs realise their ambitions for developing the future of medical devices.

Heriot-Watt’s centre will be home to a host of state-of-the-art equipment, including lasers, medical device packaging equipment and environmental testing equipment, all in a bid to enable small firms to test and manufacture small batch, commercial prototypes free of charge.

Equipment that would usually cost companies tens, or maybe even hundreds of thousands of pounds, will now be made accessible through major Scottish funding.

This includes £1.6 million from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), plus a £1.6m cash match from HWU, plus an in-kind £400,000 contribution from the four participating universities: HWU, Edinburgh, Robert Gordon, and Glasgow Universities.

Duncan Hand, HWU professor and director of the MDMC, was joined at the inauguration by the likes of Prof. Mark Biggs, Vice Principal and Heriot-Watt, as well as Minister for Business and Trade Ivan McKee, via video message.

Prof. Hand, who has previous work and research in the field of lasers, spoke with DIGIT ahead of the inauguration.

“There’s quite a range of equipment,” he said. “Some of it’s quite advanced state of the art, which allows companies to bring in some very new technologies, whereas others are a bit more established.”

Collaboration in Scotland

The first-of-its-kind facility in Scotland hopes to bring together both engineers and scientists, working alongside clinicians, to assist Scotland’s medical device SMEs.

Commenting on the opening of the Centre, Ivan McKee said that the Scottish Government welcomed the MDMC, which is supported through the Advancing Manufacturing Challenge Fund to stimulate innovation from smaller businesses.

“The Centre can help make Scotland’s healthcare more innovative in addressing urgent clinical needs, in line with ambitions for business in our National Strategy for Economic Transformation,” McKee said.

“The Centre is supporting smaller companies and startups as they overcome the challenges of prototyping and testing while meeting stringent NHS regulatory requirements. I look forward to seeing what further innovations emerge and how these help improve healthcare quality for, potentially, millions worldwide.”

The MDMC not only serves to help SMEs with manufacturing processes, but also to provide free expert advice on manufacturing engineering, regulatory issues, and funding, with its staff also providing technically supported access to its £2m manufacturing facilities.

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“We can test out different manufacturing processes for what they [firms] want to make, we can advise on maybe different approaches that they might wish to use, they can come in and get hands on time on the equipment as well,” Hand said.

“Examples might be that they’re thinking about buying a particular machine and they want to get some experience of that, or maybe they will contract that out to someone else but still getting a better understanding of those manufacturing processes helps them in development.

“It is all about developing new medical device products, and we’re helping with the manufacturing aspect of that.”

In just two years, the MDMC has created a “unique business collaboration model,” accelerating the progression of ideas to market and the adoption of medical devices into clinical settings.

Business Support

The centre, which has been in operation since the 1st of April 2020, has already helped a series of companies to get off the ground.

When asked if he thought the MDMC had been successful so far, Prof. Hand agreed: “We have engaged about 60 companies so far, in different ways.

“For a lot of them it has more been around the advice rather than the direct support for equipment, but there has also been quite a lot of projects where we have been using all the new equipment to make things and to test out different manufacturing processes.”

Hand continued: “There’s a lot of regulation of medical devices. We are developing our own expertise there but currently that’s primarily delivered from an external consultant. We are developing our own expertise, and, in the future, we will be able to provide more direct advice ourselves.

“Currently, this external consultant will provide essentially paid for from our centre to provide a free of charge initial advice to companies. We had a call out got several applications and I think we’ve got around 11 that have fully signed up to that process and we are providing companies with that support.”

Current funding rules for the centre mean that the focus is on Scottish SMEs looking to develop their devices, although Prof. Hand said he hopes that, with further funding, the centre can accommodate firms from other parts of the UK in the future.

“We set ourselves targets which were then agreed with Scottish Enterprise as part of this process, which we’re certainly doing well on in terms of meeting those,” Hand said.

He added: “We certainly are engaging with some companies from elsewhere in the UK, but we just need to be careful that we meet our targets and if we’re meeting our targets, then we can do that. So, the focus is Scottish, but we can do a bit of other stuff.”

In terms of this type of support for SMEs, the centre is just partly helping small firms along the way to manufacturing small volumes of prototypes.

These could then have applications in initial clinical trials, allowing the company to get the evidence so then they can get further investment.

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