SUTURE PLUS - Development Project resulting in a pre-production prototype to produce very high strength absorbable yarns for use in advanced medical sutures, with potential for spin off uses in other medical and non-medical applications.

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International Healthcare customers using FET equipment have made us aware of a clearbusiness opportunity to open up the fast growing world market for absorbable surgicalsutures. They tell us that the market wants products that increase quality of life for an ageingpopulation and speak of their need for yarns with much higher tenacity, to make sutures whichoffer higher holding strength and are less invasive to the body in use, giving opportunities toreplace other conventional closure materials and / or use the higher performance in finer, lowdiameter sutures for new applications.The outcome of a recent Feasibility Study has shown that we can make absorbable suturematerials with physical properties 30 - 50 % over present levels and allows us to establish abasis for further development work towards commercialisation We now have the necessarydata to design a further programme of work at a cost of £440,000 with the aim of defining,specifying and building a pre-production prototype of a technologically innovative process.We have in-house, or can obtain, access to the necessary expertise to succeed in such aproject, but need financial assistance to avoid cash flow limitations and complete the workwithin a 2 year timeframe.The developed know-how and the prototype will allow us to demonstrate our capability toachieve performance leaps to our customers to help them to differentiate their product rangesand for FET to achieve sales by providing technology and custom built equipment. Asuccessful project outcome, pursued by further development work to commercialise for sutureapplications, could realise some £5.1mn new income to FET in the period 2015 to 2018 in theform of equipment sales and process licensing. We see additional potential benefits from spinoff uses for the technology in non - medical areas and as an experimental tool for small scaleevaluation of difficult-to-process / expensive raw materials.