NORMAN GAUCHER, an assembly technician at HabCo, works on a fuel cell test stand at the company's Glastonbury plant. HabCo manufactures components for the aerospace and fuel cell industries but is looking to expand its product line into medical devices. (BOB MACDONNELL / HARTFORD COURANT / July 16, 2008)
It was only by accident that a Connecticut company best known for building equipment to test and service helicopters found itself working with one of the planet's biggest medical device makers.
HABCO Inc. of Glastonbury at first turned down the chance to work with stent-maker Boston Scientific a few years ago, said Kristin Muschett, HabCo's CEO. The Natick, Mass.-based medical device giant had approached HabCo to see if its pressure and temperature testing equipment for aerospace products could be adapted to test catheters made by Boston Scientific.
After initially balking at that prospect, HabCo ended up developing and building two products for Boston Scientific.
In the year since that first venture into medical devices, Muschett said her company, which also builds fuel cell components, is eager to build upon the success of its first — and so far, its only — venture into medical devices. She is steadfast in her belief that medical devices could add a new stream of highly profitable products for HabCo.
"It's the nature of our business that what we do in aerospace can be applied to a whole range of industries," Muschett said. "Aerospace is still our mainstay, and we're not looking to get out of that. The helicopter is going through a boom time. But that's also true for medical devices, and all signs are pointing toward growth in both."
That move — traditional aerospace firms jumping into the medical device world — is in the sights of a number of the state's economic development groups and businesses.
It's not yet a strong trend in central Connecticut, a region best known as an aerospace hub. Still, companies such as HabCo are looking eagerly at a market most analysts say will continue to make sizable annual gains as the baby boomer generation ages — especially since aerospace is famous for its boom-and-bust cycles.
"We're definitely starting to see some companies that were involved in aerospace take a look at the medical device industry and evaluate it," said Donald R. Peterson, a bioengineering professor with the University of Connecticut who also works as a consultant to companies entering the medical device world.
Much of that is being driven by smaller firms that do high-precision manufacturing work for prime aerospace contractors, Peterson said. Other than HabCo, he wasn't aware of any other aerospace firm that had made a successful jump into medical devices.
There are already a number of projects by industry groups underway designed to help companies make the move. At Asnuntuck Community College in Enfield, which has one of the state's largest training programs for manufacturing technology, a specialized program in medical device manufacturing is expected to start by September 2009, said Frank Gulluni, the head of the Asnuntuck program.
"We recognize aerospace manufacturers are looking at medical devices as a complement to what they're already doing," Gulluni said. "But there are also more than 300 medical device companies between New Haven and Northampton and it's an industry with a lot of growth potential."
The biggest push is coming from another nonprofit, Hartford-based Beacon, the region's medical device trade group. At its upcoming conference at the Connecticut Convention Center in September, called Medi2008, Beacon will reach out to aerospace companies interested in branching into medical devices, said Joseph Bronzino, executive director.
"There's a lot of precision manufacturing in this area that is used to support aerospace, but medical devices are a perfect application for that skill set," he said. "A lot of them, however, just don't know how to get into the game."
Making that jump is often easier said than done, said Larry E. Dawson, vice president of business development for Eastern Plastics in Bristol, a 168-employee plastics-machining firm that builds medical devices and diagnostic equipment for the likes of Siemens, Beckman Coulter and MedTronic.
"The equipment used in aerospace is often similar, but the way you operate is very, very different," Dawson said. "We are starting see more aggressive competition from a lot of metal machining shops, which would love to get into medical device work because it's highly profitable. We bump into them all throughout the country, although none in Connecticut. Typically, right now, it kind of happens off of the radar."
The outlook is strong for those companies that are able to live in both worlds, said Dave Hudson, vice president of Joining Technologies in East Granby — which made the move in the opposite direction. Joining, a 50-employee precision-welding firm began in medical device work but in the past few years has branched out into aerospace.
Medical device work now makes up about one-third of Joining Technologies' business, with the rest coming from aerospace, power-generation equipment, laser equipment and a few other niches. With most of those industries in growth mode, Joining Technologies sales are growing 35 percent a year, Hudson said.
"With the economy the way it is," he said, "we have tried to position ourselves to be recession-resilient."
Kenneth J. St. Onge is a free-lance writer in West Hartford.