Health Tech
Coat-X: Smart Strategy for Smart Production
Andreas Hogg, CEO, Coat-X
Smart Strategy for Smart Production
With industry 4.0 revolutionizing the automation of healthcare particularly with regards to medical device manufacturing, the segment is seeing a substantial drip in the cost of technology. Andreas Hogg, an experienced medical device technologist and the CEO of Coat-X, opines this to be the right time for biomedical companies to integrate novel fabrication methods into the production to increase effectiveness and quality control of the fabrication processes and to achieve further prices reduction of medical devices and other components. Injecting the very “smart strategy” into Coat-X, Hogg and his team of biomedical experts started to integrate the industry 4.0 concept into their production lines to increase the quality of medical devices.
The beginning of Coat-X was a joined collaboration between the company, Johnson & Johnson, and the University of Applied Sciences in Neuchatel. The output of this project was a an innovative encapsulation technology using ultrathin layers to protect against corrosion of devices across industries. “We use a combination of ultrathin layers of ceramic and polymer to protect jewelry, watch components, electronics, sensors, or medical devices against water ingress and corrosion caused by harsh environmental conditions,” says Hogg. Their innovative barrier coating works also for aggressive liquids like solvents, acids or gases and can therefore be applied in many sectors. Additionally, the technology allows the creation of ultra-flexible circuits which is an enabler for increased reliability and cutting edge technology for further miniaturization of electronics and other products developed by Coat-X’s customers.
Customer-centric at all Times
“It is integral to understand the needs of the customers and to prepare an optimal solution to answer to their needs,” Hogg says. For example, Hogg and his team offers a customer-tailored coating solution with optimized adhesion performance on different substrate materials, and additional functionalization of their coating like anti-fouling coatings or adaptation of the layer flexibility.
Meanwhile, the company claims affordability and quality to be the core values of their service. “Our new thin-film multilayer encapsulation technology is unique for its superior hermeticity and minimal volume utilization while keeping costs at a competitive level. The technology allows for further miniaturization of all kind of electronic and other smart devices,” points out Hogg.
Principles to Actions
According to Hogg, failure only directs you to the future. “It is a good strategy to learn from the failures and appreciate every small progress.” From the many memorable moments of success, Hogg recalls the time when they first measured an ultra-tight multilayer coating which proofed the concept of combining ceramic and polymeric materials into one single coating. “I have to mention that this happened after 9 months of failure test depositions.” Hogg’s bold approach has in fact helped Coat-X to upscale its production capabilities and retain a sustainable portfolio.
With his ton of biomedical production-engineering-quality experience and a “never give-up” attitude, Hogg believes in building a successful track record to be the convincing factor to both customers and investors. Moreover, “The most important thing is to go out of the lab, visit customers, and apply the technology on real business cases.”
Top 50 Healthcare Technology CEOs Of 2020
Health Tech
Viruses: Biological versus Computer
By Mark Webb-Johnson, Chief Technology Officer of Network Box
During this time of the COVID-19 pandemic, those of us working with computer viruses continue to be amazed at the similarities between the techniques used by the medical community to fight SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes the COVID-19 disease) and the processes involved in our electronic anti-virus systems. Let’s look at some of these similarities, and see how computer anti-virus researchers help protect.
By Mark Webb-Johnson, Chief Technology Officer of Network Box
What is the Virus?
SARS-CoV-2 is an RNA virus. Essentially, a strand of information wrapped up in a protective shell and a mechanism to infect cells – information, envelope, infection mechanism.
By comparison, a computer virus consists of the payload, a carrier, and an exploit mechanism. For example, the payload would be the malicious code, the carrier an email message, and the exploit mechanism something to take advantage of a vulnerability in a particular mail client. Another example would be script downloaded from a web page, taking advantage of a web browser exploit.
Replication
The virus’s primary purpose is to replicate – to make copies of itself. SARS-CoV-2 does this by infecting cells (in the lungs, stomach, and other areas of the human body), then using the cell’s own mechanisms to make copies of its RNA and make new virus particles.
Computer viruses have the same primary purpose of replication. They want to infect as many hosts as possible. Once in a computer system, they make multiple copies of themselves and transmit out to new hosts. It is this self-replication capability that defines this as a virus.
Identification and Testing
The gold standard for identifying viruses is the whole genome sequence. This maps the full sequence of the chemical components of the RNA (made up adenine, uracil, guanine, and cytosine; abbreviated as A, U, G, and C), and results in a very long string of these four letters. That is excellent for precise identification, but not so good for testing. Due to mutations, what we know of as SARS-CoV-2 is actually a collection of hundreds of different strains of the same fundamental virus, each with their own slightly different sequences (more on this later).
To test for the virus, researchers instead concentrate on relatively small portions of the full sequence. This way, they can extract samples from a potentially infected human, amplify the RNA in the sample to obtain enough to test with, and then compare that against the portion of the full sequence. That is the RT-PCR test.
Computer virus researchers work similarly. The payload of the virus itself is a sequence of computer code that can be expressed in binary, or more commonly in hexadecimal notation. Computer viruses are often intentionally self-encrypted and randomized (we call these polymorphic viruses) to avoid whole sequence detection. Nowadays, these are by far the most common form of computer virus seen.
Researchers extract portions of the sequence that don’t change and use pattern matching techniques to detect those partial sequences in suspicious samples. We call these ‘signatures,’ and they can be effectively used to detect known viruses in suspicious samples.
Immune Response and Vaccination
The human immune system has a component known as the ‘adaptive’ immune system. The system works by identifying portions of viruses already in the body, and creating antigen-specific cells designed to identify, remember, and attack that specific antigen. These cells protect against future infections of the same virus and can survive in the body for some time (months, or years, typically). This is why after you’ve had the measles once, for example, you usually don’t get it again. Vaccinations work by purposely injecting the body with antigens that will generate such an adaptive immune response, to protect you from future specific infections.
Computer anti-virus systems store databases of signatures of known viruses. When your computer receives a new file, it can scan it, look for a match against those signatures, and take action if a match is found (quarantine, etc.). Such signature-based systems are the computer equivalent to the body’s adaptive immune system.
Innate Immune Response
Another component in the human immune system is known as ‘innate.’ This system can detect what is not ‘you’ (what is ‘foreign’) and attack the invader. It relies on the antigen’s chemical properties and doesn’t need to have previously seen that specific antigen.
For computer anti-virus, this is extremely hard to achieve well. The capability to detect and block previously unknown viruses is what differentiates good anti-virus systems from the poor. Various techniques are used, but mostly revolve around a) decoding the virus code to the rawest form, b) detecting suspicious encoding or exploit behavior, and c) using emulation or sandboxing techniques to see what the virus does when executed. Looking at behavior, rather than code sequences.
Mutations and the Future
RNA viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 are very poor at accurate replication, and sometimes the copies made are not perfect. Base pairs get flipped. Portions of the sequence are lost. Parts of other viruses are incorporated. Before long, you are dealing with bad copies of bad copies of a bad copy. It is like the story of a million monkeys with a million typewriters, eventually producing the works of William Shakespeare. Sometimes these viral mutations are beneficial to the virus, but most often not. Whatever the outcome, these mutations are the way the virus adapts to further its goal of replication.
Thankfully, we do not see the same with computer viruses. A computer virus can and does make perfect copies of itself, 100% of the time. Sure, we have self-encrypting polymorphic computer viruses, and randomizing fragments are often introduced, but the core code of the virus is not changed, and certainly not randomly. Perhaps in time, we will see this, but with today’s non-forgiving computer CPU architectures, it is unlikely to be a successful approach.
Of course, given enough monkeys and enough typewriters, anything is possible. Perhaps they can even improve on Shakespeare. Before that day comes, however, make sure you are prepared. Subscribe to a Managed Security Services Provider (MSSP) that can adapt, and protect you from cyber threats.
