Lighting The Way In Worcester | Schoelly Imaging makes surgery, inspections minimally invasive
I’ve written in this column in the past about manufacturing companies that began in the basements or garages of their founders.
Schoelly Imaging Inc. is the first to have actually existed before getting its start in someone’s basement.
That someone is David McNally, the company’s president. Before becoming president of Schoelly Imaging, McNally was a medical device consultant working for a couple of different companies, one being Schoelly Fiberoptics in Germany.
After working with Schoelly and Intuitive Surgical on the joint development of imaging systems for the DaVinci Surgical System, a robotic- and computer-assisted system for minimally invasive surgery, “It was obvious that we needed a physical presence in the United States,” McNally recalled.
So, McNally approached the family-owned Schoelly, by then a 500-employee international company, and in 2005, Schoelly Imaging was launched from his basement in Holden.
At first, that struck me as unusual, but Schoelly wasn’t in McNally’s basement for long. Its first move was to Grove Street in Worcester, then to West Boylston. Last year, the company moved to a newly refurbished plant on Plantation Street in Worcester.
Today, the company has about 40 employees and is considered a separate company from its partner, Schoelly Fiberoptics in Germany. The German firm also has operations in Brazil, Malaysia, Japan and China.
At its Plantation Street facility, Schoelly manufactures and services LED light sources and accessories for endoscopes.
And endoscopic surgery represents about 80 percent of what Schoelly does.
Minimal Invasion
Schoelly’s components find their way into a variety of medical devices made by many firms. Those devices are used in arthroscopic surgery on joints, primarily the knees and shoulders. They’re also used in laparoscopic procedures, most commonly in gall bladder removal surgery.
Schoelly’s scopes are also put to work in equipment used during venal harvesting. That sounds ominous, but that’s the name for the procedure used to take a bit of vein from your thigh and put it in your heart, for example.
Pretty much any kind of minimally invasive surgery requires a lighted scope of some sort, and in many, many cases, that scope was made in part by Schoelly in Worcester. Schoelly even claims to manufacture the smallest available endoscope in the world, which comes in at 0.35 millimeters in diameter.
But these scopes have other applications, including in heavy industry.
McNally explained that the remaining 20 percent of Schoelly’s business comes from industrial customers.
Auto manufacturers and services use Schoelly scopes to inspect fuel injectors. The aviation industry uses them in engine inspections, as well. Schoelly scopes can also be found in the nuclear industry and in the forensic sciences.
Got news for our Industrial Strength column? E-mail WBJ Managing Editor Matthew L. Brown at mbrown@wbjournal.com .
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