A PIONEERING German company with the latest 21st century innovative technology, Syntellix AG serves 70 countries worldwide from its base in Singapore which includes having a manufacturing site here in the Tuas Biomedical Park.
For Syntellix, a global technology and market leader in the field of bioabsorbable metallic implants for orthopaedics and trauma surgery, Singapore has become its second home and second HQ. Riding on its success in the Republic, the company is already expanding its operations here.
"Singapore was picked due to its unique combination of highly renowned hospitals and excellent doctors, excellent universities and academic infrastructure, international financial institutions and highly proactive stock exchange, and, of course, its extremely high level of transparency, governance and compliance as well as legal reliability and political stability," says Syntellix AG CEO Prof Utz Claassen in an interview with The Business Times.
"Finding the right people is always a challenge, yet Singapore is an excellent place to recruit highly qualified and motivated professionals," he adds.
In total, Syntellix currently has 90 highly educated employees, of whom some 20 per cent are based in Singapore. And the percentage here will steeply increase as it is in a comprehensive recruiting process already.
Syntellix's fully owned subsidiary here, Syntellix Asia Pte Ltd has its headquarters in Singapore Science Park and a production site in the Tuas Biomedical Park. The internationally operating medical technology company with its headquarters in Hannover, Germany, was founded in 2008 by innovation-friendly and forward-looking investors.
The company's experience in Singapore has been quite spectacular. Initially, its subsidiary was intended to help market and distribute its products in Singapore and the region.
"Our growth has, however, by far exceeded our expectations - even during the coronavirus period we have achieved monthly growth rates in Singapore of up to more than 50 per cent. We are very happy to be supplying many of the internationally renowned hospitals and clinics in Singapore," Prof Claassen tells BT.
"So, we decided to establish a manufacturing site here in order to be able to serve the Singapore, Asean and Asian markets even faster, and Singapore evolved fast into a second headquarters in addition to Hanover and also into a second home market and second home base."
Already the company is in the process of quadrupling its finished goods production capacity here and the machinery has already arrived at its Tuas facility.
Looking ahead, it intends to expand its production capacity in Singapore even further by adding important additional process steps, and eventually to make Singapore the centre of gravity of its global value-added process chain. In Singapore alone, Syntellix wants to grow its workforce to 775 employees by 2026.
"Singapore impressively is No 1 in the IMD World Competitiveness ranking 2020, and Germany is still No 1 in the world in innovation, according to the Bloomberg Innovation Index 2020. Together that is an unbeatable combination.
"And Singapore with its Economic Development Board (EDB), its Health Sciences Authority (HSA) and the Singapore Exchange (SGX) is simply a fantastic place with fantastic people, fantastic institutions and fantastic professionals - probably overall the best location today on the planet," says Prof Claassen, who has been a visitor to Singapore and its fan for more than 30 years.
He tells BT that Syntellix was established, developed and has grown with the mission to provide intelligent innovations for a better life that billions of patients can potentially benefit from.
The Syntellix vision is even broader: to be protagonist of the age of magnesium, which undoubtedly has already begun. It all started with a simple, but decisive idea: Helping patients by developing and marketing bioabsorbable metallic implants to surgically fix bones after a fracture or in order to correct a deformity - thus eliminating any need for a second surgery to remove the implant.
"This required us to solve a problem which academia had tried in vain to solve for more than a century, since 1892, and which large established industry conglomerates had also worked on in vain for decades.
"It took us only two years to come up with a solution for a problem that others hadn't been able to solve in more than a century, and only another three years to transform that invention into an innovation. That is, to conduct an extremely successful clinical trial and receive product registration for our first product in Europe (CE approval), the MAGNEZIX® CS 3.2.
"A remarkable achievement, considering that multinational corporations and universities had tried the same - and failed - for decades."
Meanwhile, the company has expanded its product portfolio from one derivative of one product family to 184 derivatives of six product families, and has product registrations in 70 countries around the globe.
When Prof Claassen founded the company, it was just a dream. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of patients have benefitted from that dream with the audacious aspiration having become a reality.
Syntellix says that its MAGNEZIX® screws and pins, made of a globally unique patented magnesium alloy that is produced by a wholly-owned subsidiary of the company, are highly innovative because they combine, in an unprecedented way, metallic stability with bio absorbability. That is, after the healing has occurred, they disappear and transform into bone tissue.
Moreover, the company says that its devices are more elastic than traditional metal implants, and in this regard more similar to the human bone, thus reducing stress shielding, which can explain the better and reduced pain perception described by patients.
Additionally, experts attribute osteoconductive and anti-infectious properties to the company's cutting-edge implant technology, and even MRI and CT artefacts are reduced post-operatively as compared with old school titanium technology. Thus, the company says that its highly innovative implants represent various innovations in one.
Asked how Syntellix's products help the medical community and the people they are used on, the company says that the initial huge advantage is that patients neither have to live with potentially harmful foreign metal in their body for the rest of their lives, nor do they have to cope with the risk of a second surgery to remove traditional implants made of steel or titanium. Thus, they avoid the resulting risk of additional anaesthesia or an infection with hospital germs, the latter of which can even be lethal.
Says Prof Claassen: "Even in a medically advanced country such as Germany, far more people die from hospital infections than from car accidents - even without speed limits on the Autobahn.
"We believe that global replacement of titanium with magnesium technology could potentially save around 40,000 lives per year by eliminating unnecessary implant removal surgeries worldwide and avoiding the associated infection risk.
"In my simple words: half the pain, half the anxiety, half the time, half the cost, half the nuisance. And hopefully many saved lives.
"And there is more: our magnesium alloy provides for an anti-inflammatory environment; because its biomechanical characteristics are very close to bone, as already indicated, it also avoids or reduces the so-called stress-shielding, meaning the degradation of healthy bone, which frequently happens with titanium or steel.
"In addition, there are logically fewer sick days and lower costs for the healthcare system. And a happy and healthy patient obviously also makes the surgeon happy and proud. Naturally, top surgeons want to work with the best available technology."
Prof Claassen tells BT that his company's products are gaining rapid acceptance in the medical world.
Leading surgeons call MAGNEZIX® the new "gold standard" and say that Syntellix's devices are "hugely advantageous", foreseeing that "likely the era of conventional implants will soon come to an end".
More than 40 international medical-scientific publications in peer reviewed journals prove the safety, efficacy and reliability of the MAGNEZIX® implants, which are even described as "clinically superior" to conventional titanium implants for numerous clinical applications.
"Syntellix has also been granted the US FDA's "Breakthrough Device" designation for the MAGNEZIX® CS 3.2 implant, which is also frequently used in Singapore. That is a very rare distinction for an orthopaedic device as life-saving characteristics are not at all common in ortheopaedic implants," says Prof Claassen.
Overall, in its global footprint strategy, Syntellix products have already obtained approval for 70 countries on five continents.
Source: The Business Times © SPH Media Limited. Permission required for reproduction.
