Interview with Okano Masayuki, President, Okano Kogyo Co., Ltd.

(From Journal of Japanese Trade & Industry (JJTI))

Byline: Interviewer: Takamasu Kanji

Dealing with the Challenge of an "Impossible Task"

The development of the less painful needle attracted a lot of attention this year.

Okano: That is an order from the medical equipment manufacturer Terumo. I was impressed by the idea of the person who came to see me. Conventional needles are made by using a press to curve out a steel sheet and make it into a pipe, and then stretching and thinning it out, and finally forming a tip on the end. When such needles are used, the skin of people using insulin shots for diabetes, for example, becomes hardened and rough, and they must undergo pain on a daily basis. The Terumo representative had truly wanted to reduce the pain of diabetes patients, and had designed the thinnest needle with a diameter of 0.2mm, or about the size of a human hair. He had spent more than a year searching for someone willing to take on the job, but the order had been turned down repeatedly as an impossible task. Then he came to us. While I thought it looked difficult, I estimated that there was a 60% chance of success, and took on the job.

The needle with a diameter of 0.2mm had to become a thin cylinder that tapered up to 0.36mm partway down its length, in the area where it connected to the medical dispenser. This shape is simply impossible to produce by using the pipe stretching method. We would have to make the shape using the press alone. Creating a tapered cylinder in one part from the metal sheet, while considering the shape that can avoid leaking the medicine, would be technologically difficult. Furthermore, because they are disposable pen-injector needles, we needed to have a system that could cheaply mass produce hundreds of thousands of needles.

Though I thought hard about this, it was Enmoto, my son-in-law, who really worked hard here. We used a university supercomputer to calculate the shape. While Terumo began selling the product in July of this year under the name of Nano pass 33, Enmoto has been saying that the manufacturing system is still not perfect. Five years have already elapsed since we first heard about this topic. It is my sincere wish that this product will spread throughout the world and bring happiness to everyone.