Abbott Laboratories
Canvas Category OEM : Pharmaceutical
From removing the regular pain of fingersticks as people manage their diabetes to connecting patients to doctors with real-time information monitoring their hearts, from easing chronic pain and movement disorders to testing half the world’s blood donations to ensure a healthy supply, our purpose is to make the world a better place by bringing life-changing health technologies to the people who need them. That’s our commitment to helping you live your best life.
Assembly Line
Abbott Nutrition: Improving Manufacturing Productivity at Abbott Nutrition
Abbott’s Nutrition, a division of the global healthcare company, manufactures a wide variety of science-based nutrition products. In 1999, Abbott Nutrition began working with OSIsoft’s PI System to integrate, collect, and contextualize data at the company’s manufacturing plant in Columbus, Ohio. Based on its success at this plant, in 2012 the company entered into an OSIsoft Enterprise Agreement (EA) to include all Abbott Nutrition manufacturing sites globally. This created a huge volume of data, but also presented the challenge of extracting maximum value from the data.
3D Printing: Powering Innovation, Health
Abbott scientists and engineers use 3D printing to develop prototype tools that enhance product development for devices used to treat vascular disease. They prototype parts used in next-generation medical diagnostics. In fact, these 3D-printed items could make it faster, more innovative, less expensive and more efficient to develop new medical devices and products—all with the ultimate goal of helping people live longer, healthier lives. At a time when personalized and customizable medicine is taking center stage, 3D printing technology points to increasingly sophisticated uses tomorrow.
In addition to working with each other, Capek challenged the businesses to partner with emerging external resources—start-up firms and forward-thinking organizations—that are pushing innovation in the 3D space, especially when it comes to patient-specific advances. In fact, Abbott’s vascular R&D team recently worked with the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine’s Dr. Anthony Atala, one of the world’s leading regenerative medicine researchers, to prototype a 3D-printed bioabsorbable heart support device that’s customized for a patient’s own anatomy and function. “In the future,” said Hossainy, “a device like this has real potential to benefit people with advanced congestive heart failure.”