Through Jan. 28, some 26.2 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine had been administered in the United States. However, given that the U.S. population totals 330 million, and that each person will need two doses of vaccine, there’s still a lot of work to be done. Hundreds of millions of syringes will be needed just in the United States. Automation is the only way to meet that kind of demand.
Recently, a large medical device OEM contracted with NuTec Tooling Systems, a machine builder in Meadville, PA, to design and build a system to automate the process of coating plastic syringes for medical diagnostics, including a COVID-19 application. Competing products are made from glass, which is more costly than plastic. The OEM gained a competitive advantage by developing a process to coat the inside of a plastic syringe to give it a glass-like finish. That makes the OEM’s plastic product as good as glass versions, but less expensive. The problem then became how to automate the coating process.