Clever products and reshoring are interesting, but they need to make commercial sense. Brent Balinski spoke to Alan Lipman, CEO of Romar Engineering, about the company’s recent work, the impact of Covid-19 on bringing manufacturing home, and more.
On any list of great Australian inventions, medical technologies tend to make up a healthy share: cochlear implants, spray-on skin, artificial pacemakers etcetera. Nowadays, if there’s an exciting local invention in or on its way to market, there’s some chance Romar Engineering will have a hand in it. The western Sydney-based company is a quiet achiever, respected within the Australian manufacturing industry but not well-known outside of it.
Lead company, startup Nutromics, sought out Romar in “how to become a computer engineer” last year, recalls Alan Lipman, Romar’s CEO since 2016, due to his company’s work on microneedles. The complex product will use these to extract samples from wearers, move fluid to a lab-on-a-chip, and transmit information to an app, allowing an at-risk wearer to know the effects of their nutritional intake in real-time.
“Everybody can make a piece of it and they can all make a piece of it in a different laboratory. And that’s great, but that doesn’t mean that that’s how things are commercially made… You piece it all together, it might cost you $700 a patch,” Lipman tells @AuManufacturing, adding that their contribution includes providing “manufacturing realism” to the project.
On any list of great Australian inventions, medical technologies tend to make up a healthy share: cochlear implants, spray-on skin, artificial pacemakers etcetera. Nowadays, if there’s an exciting local invention in or on its way to market, there’s some chance Romar Engineering will have a hand in it. The western Sydney-based company is a quiet achiever, respected within the Australian manufacturing industry but not well-known outside of it.
Lead company, startup Nutromics, sought out Romar in “how to become a computer engineer” last year, recalls Alan Lipman, Romar’s CEO since 2016, due to his company’s work on microneedles. The complex product will use these to extract samples from wearers, move fluid to a lab-on-a-chip, and transmit information to an app, allowing an at-risk wearer to know the effects of their nutritional intake in real-time.
“Everybody can make a piece of it and they can all make a piece of it in a different laboratory. And that’s great, but that doesn’t mean that that’s how things are commercially made… You piece it all together, it might cost you $700 a patch,” Lipman tells @AuManufacturing, adding that their contribution includes providing “manufacturing realism” to the project.
No comments:
Post a Comment