Dow Corning Announces at MD&M West 2017 Expansion of North American Healthcare Application Center, Spotlights Growing Healthcare Silicones Portfolio

As part of its strong focus on driving innovation in healthcare, Dow Corning, a global leader in silicones, silicon-based technology and innovation and a wholly owned subsidiary of The Dow Chemical Company, announced here today at MD&M West 2017 (booth 1921), that it is investing in state-of-the-art capabilities and new product technologies. In particular, the company is expanding its North American Healthcare Application Center in Midland, Mich. with additional capabilities for characterizing material performance to support advanced application development and help customers develop new innovations. Equally important, Dow Corning continues to expand its portfolio with new medical-grade silicone solutions, such as soft skin adhesives (SSAs) for optimizing the patient experience with wearable devices, all of which are on display at the company’s booth.

“Innovation in material technologies is essential to enable tomorrow’s medical breakthroughs, particularly novel skin-adhered diagnostic and therapeutic devices,” said Marie Crane, Healthcare marketing leader, Dow Corning. “Dow Corning continues to invest in both advanced silicone solutions and application development capabilities, which go hand-in-hand. By generating meaningful data related to material performance and processing, we can better help our customers gain a competitive advantage with the design and manufacture of new products that incorporate our medical grade siliconbased technologies.”

Expanded Application Center
The Healthcare Application Center, located at Dow Corning headquarters, has been significantly enhanced with new metrology and molding equipment, notably a 60T injection molding machine and dosing pump, stress/strain equipment and a conditioning chamber. A large staff of engineers and chemists provide training, technical support and testing to help customers in North America understand the properties of Dow Corning’s medical-grade silicone solutions and use them to design successful new products. These materials include the company’s liquid silicone rubber (LSR) and high consistency rubber (HCR) product lines, as well as its other silicone elastomers and adhesives for healthcare applications.

The center routinely produces samples for material characterization using various bio-qualification tests and is supported by global regulatory, stewardship and toxicology Dow Corning experts. “Dow Corning continues to invest in infrastructure and capabilities that significantly benefit our healthcare customers,” said Roger Hendrick, industry specialist and application engineer, Dow Corning. “These major enhancements to our application center will yield data and knowledge that support product development. This initiative is a great example of our ongoing efforts to become a valuable ally for customers as they create the next generation of medical devices.”

Latest Silicone Technologies
Dow Corning is showcasing at its booth its strongest soft skin adhesive to date: Dow Corning® MG 7- 1010 Soft Skin Adhesive. This new high-performance technology bridges the gap between the company’s high-adhesion pressure sensitive adhesives (PSAs) and gentle-adhesion SSAs to deliver strong attachment for today’s wearable medical devices. Peel adhesion tests on polycarbonate film show that this SSA provides more than double the adhesion force of the next strongest SSA in Dow Corning’s portfolio.

Dow Corning MG 7-1010 Soft Skin Adhesive provides coating process flexibility because of the low viscosities of its two components; its primerless adhesion to substrates; and its suitability for direct- or transfer-coated manufacturing.

Visitors to the Dow Corning booth can examine product samples using the new SSA. Potential applications include wearable monitoring devices, wound care products, medical tape applications and medical device attachments.

Dow Corning is also featuring a recently launched aqueous emulsion that can be used to lubricate medical devices and parenteral containers. Dow Corning® 366 35% Dimethicone NF Emulsion is formulated without parabens and octylphenyl ethoxylates (OPE) surfactant, which are substances of very high concern under the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) regulation. It is made with silicone that is compliant with dimethicone (NF) and dimethicone (Ph. Eur.) monographs.