Biomedical Structures
Warwick-based Biomedical Structures (BMS) is not your typical Rhode Island textile manufacturer. They are a full-service contract manufacturer of permanent and resorbable implantable biomedical fabric structures; providing their clients with design, engineering and manufacturing services. Through companies like BMS, Rhode Island's long established textile industry is witnessing a new emergence. This transformation into medical applications is driven by the medical device industry's demand for novel textile designs that require innovative processing techniques using traditional and non-traditional fibers.
"With just 20 employees, our strength lies in our innovativeness," says John Gray, president of BMS. Their niche resides in the ability to engineer and transform very expensive fibers into high value-added medical products. Applications include fabrics for hernia, spine, knee and shoulder repair as well as treatments for incontinence and cosmetic/reconstructive surgery. 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. All BMS products are intended to be implanted surgically into humans.
Their success, as evidenced by double-digit growth, is based on several key factors: a strong technology platform, superior relationships with suppliers, the protection of proprietary information and processes, and excellent operational relationships with their customers. They achieve this by functioning as an extension of their customers' engineering and design staffs.
The key advantage that customers experience with BMS is that their projects are shepherded through the various design and evaluation gates that are integral to the development a new medical product — from inception, prototyping, clinical trials and ultimately recurring production. With BMS' expertise, guidance and broad technology platform, product commercialization and market success can be more rapidly achieved by both small and large medical device manufacturers.
Rhode Island has played a crucial role in allowing BMS to connect and collaborate with a vast array of educational resources and networks. "Rhode Island has welcomed BMS from the start," says Gray. "We have been fortunate to obtain state training grants which greatly assisted us in elevating our staff with an enhanced portfolio of skills — a key driver of growth for our business. We could have located anywhere. In fact, the vast majority of our customers are from outside of the state and a growing number are from outside of the country. Yet the presence of a highly motivated and receptive biomedical business community, institutions of higher learning and governmental agencies, ensure a sustained commitment to this state."
BMS has been able to successfully tap into programs and resources at both the Community College of Rhode Island and the University of Rhode Island. Gray feels that they produce graduates that are well prepared and eager to support BMS' staffing needs. He even commissioned a MBA team from URI to prepare a global demand study for surgical textiles whose findings are incorporated into the company's current business model. He also sees the climate as only getting better, given the governor's and legislature's strong commitment to supporting local biomedical enterprises and raising the level of technical education to meet biomedical industry needs.
So why does a biomedical company president like BMS' John Gray, whose customers reside out of state and who personally lives in Massachusetts, stay in Rhode Island?
It's the "we can do it" spirit he finds here. "I find a collective enthusiasm that the smallest state in the union has in reshaping itself into a center for advancing technologies," he says. "I know that small, innovative, entrepreneurial companies matter in this state. In a larger state, we might not even get noticed; here we represent an important piece of the puzzle, a piece of Rhode Island's biotech future, and that makes building this business in Rhode Island very exciting."