Taking Plastic Medical Device Concepts to Scaled Production
Teel offers a robust suite of engineering support, regulatory knowledge, material science expertise, and extrusion and injection molding manufacturing processes that consistently meet strict quality standards. As an ISO 13485-certified manufacturer, Teel helps medical device companies reduce risk and transform early-stage concepts into scalable, high-quality products with speed, providing engineering-driven solutions while maintaining the tight tolerances, consistency, and quality required for today’s medical devices.
What Medical Manufacturing Services Does Teel Offer?
Teel supports medical device manufacturers throughout the product development lifecycle, offering:
- Product design using Design for Manufacturability (DFM) principles
- Co-engineering and technical collaboration
- Rapid prototyping and initial production
- Material selection and polymer development
- Precision medical extrusion
- Medical injection molding
- Clean room manufacturing
- Validation, testing, and regulatory support
- High-volume production and supply chain scalability
This integrated approach reduces risk, speeds time to market, and creates a smoother transition from prototype to large-scale manufacturing.
Why Do Medical Device Companies Choose to Partner with Teel?
Teel provides collaborative support throughout every phase of development and production.
Customers rely on Teel for:
- Engineering-focused product development and problem solving
- ISO 13485- and ISO 9001-certified manufacturing, regularly passing customer and certification audits with no findings
- Expertise and guidance from our team of engineers, chemists, manufacturing specialists, and regulatory and technical professionals
- Award-winning customer service as evidenced by multiple Plastics News recognitions
- Proven experience scaling production from prototype to producing parts in the millions
- Advanced polymer science, material development, and testing help through our ISO 17025-accredited analytical lab
Rather than simply manufacturing components, Teel helps optimize designs for manufacturability, performance, and long-term production success, while offering additional services, capabilities, and expertise to our customers as part of our partnership.
What Medical Device Components Does Teel Make?
Teel extrudes and injection molds plastic medical devices for diverse medical markets and applications. Examples include:
- Medical tubing with a broad array of end uses, including fluid management
- Diagnostic devices
- Surgical components
- Drug-delivery components
- Medical disposables
- Respiratory care components
- Medical interventional components
What Types of Medical-Grade Plastics Does Teel Process?
Selecting the right polymer is critical to medical device performance, durability, sterilization compatibility, mating component interfacing, and regulatory compliance.
Teel works with a broad range of medical-grade materials, including:
- Polyurethane (TPU)
- Polyolefin Elastomers (TPE)
- Polyamide (Nylon)
- PETG
- PEEK
- PEBA
- Polycarbonate
- Polystyrene
- Flexible PVC
- Polypropylene
- Polyethylene
- ABS
- Butyrate
- Styrenic Block Copolymers (SBC)
Teel’s material capabilities include:
- High-temperature polymers
- Water-sensitive materials
- Silicone alternatives
- Phthalate-free plasticizers
- Bio-based materials
- Sustainable resin options
- Custom polymer formulations
- Proprietary blended materials
- Multi-material combinations (coextrusion and layering)
Teel can also develop custom compounds when commercially available materials do not meet specific application requirements.
Does Teel Offer Engineering and Product Development?
Successful medical devices begin with strong engineering, so Teel’s engineering team provides comprehensive product development services that help improve manufacturability while reducing production costs and development timelines.
Engineering and development capabilities include:
- Design for Manufacturability (DFM) with an emphasis on application-specific quality requirements
- Rapid prototyping
- Process development with monitoring down to a single factor
- Regulatory guidance
- Scientific injection molding
- Extrusion flow modeling to reduce manufacturing complexity and promote dimensional consistency
Further, Teel’s in-house ISO 17025-accredited analytical laboratory specializing in polymer science allows customers to perform analytical testing, material evaluation, reverse engineering, and product validation without relying on outside laboratories.
What are Teel’s Medical Extrusion Capabilities?
Teel specializes in complex medical tubing extrusion for applications requiring precisely engineered dimensions and manufacturing consistency.
Extrusion capabilities include:
- Thin-wall tubing
- Small diameter tubing (sizes down to 0.02″ OD and 0.002″ ID)
- Tight-tolerance extrusion
- Multilumen tubing
- Multilayer and coextruded tubing
- Paratube extrusion
- Mandrel extrusion
- Custom non-round tubing profiles
Teel’s medical manufacturing facility includes more than 30 extrusion lines equipped with:
- Inline dimensional measurement
- Statistical Process Control (SPC)
In addition, Teel’s use of flow modeling emphasizes a specialized tooling design approach focused on precisely engineered dimensions and reducing extrusion process complexity. This helps ensure repeatable production, consistent quality, and efficient transition to high-volume manufacturing.
What are Teel’s Medical Injection Molding Capabilities?
Teel manufactures complex medical plastic components using Scientific Molding principles and advanced injection molding technology.
Capabilities include:
- High-cavitation tooling
- Overmolding
- Robotics-assisted molding processes
- Clean room molding
- Secondary finishing operations
The facility houses 17 Arburg injection molding machines in multiple tonnage sizes, enabling production of both small, precision components and larger medical parts.
Conformal cooling mold design improves dimensional consistency while protecting delicate and thin-wall components throughout production.
Does Teel Offer Clean Room Manufacturing?
Teel offers clean room protection for devices that require controlled manufacturing environments to minimize contamination.
Teel operates ISO Class 8 clean rooms with capacity for:
- Extrusion
- Injection molding
- Finishing
- Assembly
- Packaging
What Sustainable Medical Manufacturing Options Does Teel Offer?
Teel incorporates sustainability into both facility design and manufacturing processes.
Sustainability initiatives include:
- Bio-based resins
- Phthalate-free plasticizers
- Material rework and regrind programs where appropriate
- Packaging optimization
- Energy-efficient manufacturing systems
- Facility designs that reduce environmental impact
These solutions help manufacturers reduce waste while supporting environmental goals without compromising product quality.
How Does Teel Scale Medical Device Production?
Many manufacturers struggle when transitioning from prototype development to large-scale production. Teel bridges that gap in extrusion by first using highly engineered flow modeling production designs geared toward both performance and scaled manufacturability. Further, Teel maintains an interchangeable equipment system that smooths the transition from development to scaled production. Teel’s dedicated Injection molding engineering team, large fleet of 17 Arburgs of various sizes, and linear robotics assist Teel in ramping up injection molding production quickly. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Teel’s injection molding department produced test kit swabs sticks in the billions.
Because Teel’s engineering, production, analytical testing, and clean rooms are all under one roof, customers benefit from a streamlined and coordinated process from beginning to end.
