Singapore’s first heart-valve factory opens
By Shobana Kesava
BIG BUSINESS: Edwards Lifesciences makes heart valves, designed to replace damaged ones in the human body. — ST PHOTO: AZIZ HUSSIN
A GLOBAL leader in the manufacture of artificial heart valves, Edwards Lifesciences (EL), opened a US$20 million (S$27 million) plant in Singapore yesterday, its first full-fledged factory outside the United States.
By the end of next year, the facility is expected to produce up to 30 per cent of the company’s valves, said Mr Randel Woodgrift, EL’s vice-president of manufacturing operations.
The EL facility is the first heart-valve manufacturing plant in Singapore.
The valves are used to replace flaps in the heart connected to important blood vessels that have been damaged by disease.
They are made largely from the sacs that surround cow hearts, and metal wire that is also used in the aerospace industry.
The market for the valves is huge; global sales last year topped US$1 billion.
By the end of this year, the factory plans to expand from the painstaking assembly of heart valves to the manufacture of EL’s latest aids for the heart, said its corporate vice-president of heart valve therapy, Mr Donald Bobo.
The facility will serve as EL’s headquarters for the Asia Pacific, an area which he said has seen a dramatic increase in heart disease.
In some countries, such treatments for the disease ‘don’t even exist yet’, he said.
Covering 10,000 sq m in Changi North, the new facility sits on premises slightly larger than a soccer field and has room to grow.
EL is not entirely new to Singapore.
It began with 10 staff members in 2005 in rented premises at Kaki Bukit, just a tenth the size of its new site.
EL, which has about 5,600 employees globally, has a staff strength of about 300 here. This is expected to reach 500 by 2011.
Research and development may be considered in the Singapore facility in five years.
An Economic Development Board spokesman said EL’s investment is significant to growing the medical technology sector.
Growth in the sector is targeted at $5 billion by 2015. It hit $2.6 billion last year.
Source : Straits Times - 23 May 2008
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