Junkosha has announced a new catheter liner category, Wrapped Liner, at MD&M Midwest in Minneapolis. The company says the category establishes a different approach to catheter liner construction and draws on decades of experience in fluoropolymer technologies.
The platform uses Junkosha’s proprietary PTFE tape engineering and wrapping technology. According to the company, it is designed as an alternative platform for catheter liners that combines high tensile strength, thin-wall construction and flexibility.
Instead of extruding a complete tube, the manufacturing process wraps PTFE film around a mandrel to form the liner wall. By engineering the properties of the PTFE tape, Junkosha says it can create a liner platform designed to achieve a thin, uniform wall thickness with exceptional strength. The company says this gives catheter designers and manufacturers greater freedom to select finer braid or coil wire, or to reallocate space elsewhere in the catheter construction.
Steve Maxson, founder of Maxson InSight Services, said catheter engineers often describe profile as king, but low-profile design involves more than reducing wall thickness. He said a catheter still must resist kinking and ovalization while retaining the flexibility its application needs. Noting that extruded and film-cast liners are already available in very thin walls, he said the opportunity is in how thin-wall construction and strength work together to change how engineers approach catheter design.
Junkosha says that balance of thinness, strength and more uniform properties is central to new catheter development because it may create greater flexibility in how reinforcement is configured. The Wrapped Liner category is intended as a scalable platform to support a growing portfolio of solutions tailored to evolving catheter requirements.
Kevin LaDow, chief sales officer of Junkosha USA Inc., said current catheter liners are either dip-coated PTFE built up on a mandrel or extruded PTFE supplied as tubing cut to length. He said that as the industry heads into 2027, there is a need for a new liner category that is manufactured differently and offers unique benefits for small-format catheter OEMs. According to LaDow, the approach extends catheter design possibilities to support next-generation devices intended to enhance flexibility and broaden the range of anatomies that may be accessed and treated.
The announcement focuses on how the liner wall is built, rather than only on reducing its thickness. Junkosha says the combination of a thin, strong and more uniform liner may allow catheter developers to reconsider reinforcement and other elements of catheter architecture.