Managing a chronic condition is difficult – controlling your symptoms, keeping your doctor’s appointments, monitoring your day-to-day activities, and making sure that you keep on top of your medication – all these are factors that challenge chronic disease management. Now imagine needing to administer your medication through injections and throw the fear of needles into the mix.

Drugs are formulated in a variety of forms according to how they can best achieve therapeutic effect. To increase patient convenience, many chronic disease therapies are formulated for home treatment. The more prevalent forms of home treatment include oral, topical, inhalation, and injections. Because injections, which are mostly biological formulations, can be delivered directly to its systemic target, they are growing in demand, especially for the management of chronic conditions.

However, fear of needles is a common phenomenon that can potentially deter patients from adhering to their treatments. According to statistics, approximately 20% to 30% of 20 to 40-year-olds suffer from fear of needles. In Taiwan, the more common form of self-injection is insulin injection through pen injectors. For these types of treatments, patients need to manually prepare the needle before injection. With more and more injectable biologics being formulated to treat a variety of chronic diseases, pharmaceutical companies are increasingly turning to single-use, pre-filled autoinjectors for self-injection. And one of the world’s largest supplier of these injection devices is SHL Group – a global company deeply rooted in Taiwan.

Accelerated Growth: Thriving Autoinjector Market Drives SHL’s Rapid Growth

Single-use autoinjectors are built with pre-installed needles that are hidden throughout the injection process. This eliminates the patient’s exposure to the needle, which helps reduce fear and improve medication compliance. Due to their ease of use, autoinjectors enable patients to complete their injections in the comfort of their own homes, sparing patients from regular trips back and forth the hospital. As autoinjectors are pre-filled for single use, they also increase convenience and help ensure dose accuracy. 

Areas in which autoinjectors have been approved for use have broadened over the years to include chronic and acute diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, migraine, type 2 diabetes, anemia, hypercholesterolemia, and hypoglycemia, to name a few. And many of these therapies are approved in devices designed and manufactured by SHL. “Our growth is driven by patients, who drive pharma companies to offer simpler solutions for their home treatments,” said Martin Turvill, managing director at SHL Taiwan. Now, the majority of the world’s top 25 pharmaceutical companies have worked with the largest company under SHL Group – SHL Medical. 

Rapid growth has accelerated SHL’s expansion and the company has since set up nine manufacturing facilities across Taoyuan. Inaugurated in 2004, the TY1 (Taoyuan 1) facility covers 25,000 square meters – equivalent to the size of three soccer fields. TY1 joined several other facilities in Taoyuan’s Nankan area, which have also been expanded over the years. However, the capacity needed to be scaled even further and by 2015, SHL decided to build a ninth facility, the Liufu site, located in Luzhu District, Taoyuan, to meet the growing demands from customers.

SHL’s Liufu facility spans over 63,000 square meters of modern office space and advanced manufacturing capacities. Aside from being home to SHL’s main office operations in Taiwan, the facility also offers mass production services for injection molding, automated assembly, and advanced testing. “Competition is intense and to stay at the forefront of the industry, we must continue to innovate our offerings as well as optimize our production processes. Our Liufu Site was specifically designed so that the flow of materials and components could be streamlined to optimize the manufacturing process and boost production efficiency,” said Turvill. 

Now, SHL Group employs over 4,800 employees worldwide, 4,000 of which in Taiwan, and has locations in the US, Switzerland, China, and Sweden. 

However, SHL is not your typical foreign company. SHL was established in Taiwan by Swedish founder Roger Samuelsson, who came to Taiwan in the late 1980s as a tourist after the “Made in Taiwan” label in his favorite pair of boxing gloves caught his attention. When he visited the island at the age of 20, little did he know that he would end up staying and becoming an entrepreneur, let alone running one of the world’s largest supplier of autoinjectors. 

Turvill describes Samuelsson with the proverb, “Fortune Favors the Bold.” Samuelsson saw an opportunity in Taiwan, trusted his instincts, and ultimately found success. SHL started out as a trading company, stepped into the business of plastic injection molding, and is now a leader in the autoinjector industry.

Competitive Edge: Bringing Know-how And Manufacturing In-house

SHL’s success can be attributed to three important factors. First, SHL brought the various aspects of the manufacturing process in-house, from tooling, injection molding, through to testing and assembly. Each injector comprises of around a dozen or more components, and the majority of these components are produced in-house. Turvill notes that this allows SHL to maintain better control over production quality as well as enables end-to-end traceability. Taiwanese mechanical engineers developed the automated assembly and testing equipment, and under the leadership of former Taiwan Managing Director and current CEO Ulrich Faessler, were able to grow into a fully fledged department driving a large proportion of the company’s production. Turvill, who is from the UK, is certainly impressed by and proud of this in-house capability. 

Secondly, SHL has amassed an immense competitive advantage through the accumulation of industry know-how and honing of talents over the last 30 years. “The gentlemen who designed one of our first autoinjectors, and who knows everything about the device, is still working for us today,” Martin said proudly, adding, “This shows that we are doing things right.” 

Despite designing devices for pharmaceutical companies on a contract basis, SHL owns much of the technologies and know-how that covers its products through a comprehensive intellectual property (IP) strategy. SHL has its own legal and IP departments specializing in fortifying SHL’s IPs, which is another competitive advantage SHL has been able to capitalize on. Based on its experience in Original Equipment Manufacturing (OEM), SHL also established SHL Technologies – a group company providing contract development and manufacturing services for medical devices and industrial equipment. 

Innovative R&D capabilities are also keys to SHL’s success. SHL foresees that the future will be highly digital and that autoinjectors will be built with technologies to support digital healthcare. Linked to Cloud-based medical software, new generation autoinjectors will be able to support an array of stakeholder needs, such as the tracking of injection time and injection behavior. Two years ago, SHL partnered with a software company in the US while it continued to develop its own IP in the area. These new technologies are expected to not only provide medical teams with data for the assessment of treatment efficacy but can also be used as reference for the design of future products. 

Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies are increasingly seeing the importance of engaging with device developers in the early stages of the drug development process. SHL actively engages with its customers’ formulation teams to understand their requirements, working together so that it can offer the best solutions to deliver their innovative treatments. “You don’t remain at the top of the business for 30 years without working together with your customers,” Turvill added. By engaging early on, the difficulty and complexity in subsequent autoinjector manufacturing can be significantly reduced. To facilitate communications, SHL also has offices in Europe and North America. 

Looking into the future with its core competencies and the foundation it has laid with advanced in-house manufacturing, SHL will continue to develop cutting-edge autoinjectors and further optimize its manufacturing processes. This is in line with SHL’s culture of continuous improvement. Turvill noted that after 30 years in the industry, SHL still upholds its entrepreneurship, making constant improvements to further solidify its leading position in the market. On the other hand, SHL Medical, which is headquartered in Switzerland, is ready to strengthen its business model and consolidate its core capabilities to keep abreast of industry challenges and meet the future demands of medicine.

About SHL

SHL Group is a world-leading solution provider in the design, development, and manufacturing of advanced drug delivery devices such as autoinjectors, pen injectors and advanced inhaler systems. It also offers core competencies and services in the fields of MedTech and patient care solutions. With locations in Taiwan, Switzerland, Sweden, China, and the US, SHL’s experienced engineers and designers develop product enhancements as well as breakthrough drug delivery and patient care solutions for pharma and biotech clients globally. Significant investment in R&D has enhanced our broad pipeline of next-generation drug delivery systems that support ongoing innovations in drug development and digital healthcare. This includes advanced reusable and disposable injectors that can accommodate high volume and high viscosities and can be enhanced through digital implementations.

Content sponsored by SHL Taiwan