Minitubes
Augmenting Medical Device Operability with High-Precision Tubes

‘A specialist in custom manufacturing small, high precision metal tubes’ is perhaps the best way to describe Minitubes. Founded in 1932, the company has been spearheading innovation excellence in manufacturing unrivaled metal tubing and fabricated tubular parts for a wide range of applications. To do this, it has developed several techniques and designed its proprietary processes that help meet clients’ demanding product specifications. “We’re always committed to providing customers with innovative solutions from design to prototyping to production,” says Philippe Poncin, President, Minitubes.

As a family-owned and -operated business, Minitubes has always been keen to uphold its business model and adhere to the philosophy of customer-centricity. It took a strategic turn towards medical applications, where the majority of its operations were focused on manufacturing metal tubes for the healthcare industry ever since the third generation under Poncin assumed its management. In fact, his entrepreneurial drive and innovation-first approach have taken Minitubes up the ladder and accelerated its technological adaptation and process development. Today, the company holds over 90 percent of potential business in the medical and life sciences industry and serves as a strategic supplier of several large OEMs.

Minitubes’ product portfolio encompasses a wide range of high precision metal tubes that primarily serve three segments in the medical space—cardiac implant tubing, specialty catheters, and IVD. The company serves as a global leader in cardiac implant tubing with its flagship products for heart valves and stents. Since vascular implants require high-quality and performance tubes, Minitubes delivers unique quality implant tubes specific to heart stents and valves in a wide choice of alloys. The company’s ability to offer seamless tubes with dimensional accuracy and flawless interior and exterior surfaces makes it a partner of choice for the world's largest stent producers. Specialty catheters is another area that Minitubes excels at. The company leverages its longstanding experience in manufacturing metal tubes to develop small and demanding components that fulfill their product requirements. It also has an expert set of hands in manufacturing exceptional probes for IVD machines.

We’re always committed to providing customers with innovative solutions from design to prototyping to production

What gives Minitubes an edge over the competition is its manufacturing excellence and the ability to push the limits of tight tolerance requirements. With a customer-first approach embedded in its corporate DNA, it always listens to clients to understand their specifications to design an ideal manufacturing process that serves their devices’ functional requirements. Moreover, the company goes the extra mile to attend several cardiovascular and IVD conventions to understand various medical devices’ operational parameters, which helps them optimize their development processes and augment their capabilities.

Elaborating on Minitubes value proposition, Poncin recalls its collaboration with a large OEM seeking a small tubular component with 0.35 mm outer diameter (OD) and exceptionally stringent specification to go with their diagnostic catheter. Primarily, the company helped simplify their drawing by proposing tight OD tolerances, allowing them to save on costs by avoiding centerless grinding and the need for connecting components. Secondly, being able to redo their design, Minitubes helped them optimize their catheters’ torque transmission. The company also created an ideal specification to maximize the component’s functional performance by considering different manufacturing parameters from alloy selection to heat treatment.

Having garnered countless acclaims from satisfied and happy clients, Minitubes plans to scale further by augmenting its capabilities. As Poncin explains, “We see large prospects for our products in a couple of fields—one being the increasing use of cobalt-chromium tubing that promises high strength, low profile, performance, steerability, and torque transmission over stainless steel and nitinol.” Integrating laser-cut patterns to cobalt-chromium tubing combines high strength and elasticity to optimize device functional performances. This can create a significant impact on steerable delivery devices for mitral and tricuspid valve replacement. IVD is another area that has gained a lot of traction in the last decade, and Minitubes prides itself on being the only manufacturer of probes that meet today’s requirements by producing the tubing internally. “With our out-of-the-box approach to problems, we always stand atop the ladder and intend to explore the uncharted territories in the medical space,” concludes Poncin.