Elixir (Volume 1, Issue 1)
Making Children Healthier with Design
We can’t think of a better way to lead off the first issue of elixir than by announcing Nectar’s recent collaboration with the Releef Initiative, an outstanding international non-profit dedicated to improving the health prospects of children in third-world countries and underserved areas by developing new, more effective pharmaceutical products. Working with the initiative, Nectar created a new kind of dispenser designed to administer dosages of tiny medicinal pellets.
Releef developed the pellets because of the difficulty of administering correct amounts of medicine using traditional pills and liquids in impoverished areas. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), overly large or small dosages of antibiotics, pain relievers, and vitamin and mineral supplements are administered, and the difference between an incorrect and a correct dosage can often be a matter of life and death.
To deal with this very serious problem, Releef developed the tiny pellets to make administering the correct dosages easier. However, without a dispenser, ensuring that the tiny pills were consumed was, at best, problematic. The new devices were designed especially to make administering the pellets easy to adjust from the point of view health care workers, as well as child-friendly for the benefit of small patients.
One of a number of pro-bono projects that Nectar has taken on in recent years, these hand-held pharmaceutical dispensers were made using inexpensive raw materials that allow for longer shelf life. Ensuring that the devices are widely available is, Releef tells us, going to be an important contribution to worldwide health. All in all, not bad for a day’s work.
Nectar Client Rates $1.5 Billion Sale
One of our best clients, Pennsylvania medical product manufacturer Viasys Healthcare, Inc., has been acquired by Ohio-based medical giant Cardinal Healthcare, Inc. — a corporate merger to the tune of nearly one and a half billion dollars. With assets in excess of $80 billion and a ranking of fourteenth on the Fortune 500, Cardinal seeks to expand its base in the field of respiratory and other medical devices through the purchase. Viasys earned 2006 sales of $610 million and is a leader in respiratory care and other medical specialties.
Announcing the transaction in a press release, Cardinal CEO R. Kerry Clark said, “Now that VIASYS is part of Cardinal Health, we are ready to move forward and bring our combined offerings to global customers,” adding that “VIASYS is a great strategic fit with Cardinal Health that expands our global presence and provides a new channel to accelerate growth from our other core businesses.” We think this translates as, “it’s a good thing that will allow Cardinal to manufacture great new products and make more money for itself and its stockholders.” Sounds good.
For more on Viasys Products, click here.
“Renewable Plastic”….Say What?
Lately, we’ve been hearing of bloggers who’ve made New Year’s resolutions to reduce their use of plastic or end it entirely — no small task considering the number of goods that are made of plastic or come packaged in the stuff. Considering that petroleum-based plastic doesn’t break down, creates a significant threat to the environment — including the world’s oceans — and isn’t always recyclable, the problem is a nasty one that isn’t going away any time soon.
But maybe not if Cereplast, an innovative firm that Nectar has been collaborating with recently, succeeds on a large enough scale. The Hawthorne-based company takes its name from its practice of substituting fossil fuels with such cereals as corn and wheat to create plastics that are both biodegradable and compostable. Cereplast is currently manufacturing a limited variety of consumer and industrial products to order, but with enough clients there’s no reason that it can’t be making everything from supermarket bags to those damnable clamshell packages that electronic products are sold in. When that happens, bloggers can go back to making resolutions about losing weight and cutting back on trashy reality television. Check out Cereplast’s web site .