Inventing Medical Technology Is Only The Beginning

By Sherri Claydon| Vancouver City News | October 8, 2026

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Republication Note
Originally published by Vancouver City News. Republished by Delta City News as part of the WBN News Network.

Inventing medical technology is only the beginning. A Burnaby company is now tackling what comes next.

Medical innovation gets attention when something new is invented, succeeds in clinical trials or receives regulatory approval. Less visible is what has to happen after that: turning a proven technology into something that can be manufactured reliably, repeatedly and at commercial scale.

That requires more than a bigger factory. Manufacturing processes have to hold up as production increases. Regulatory requirements continue after approval. Suppliers, equipment and quality systems have to scale. So does the workforce.

Kardium, a Burnaby medical-device company almost two decades into developing technology to treat atrial fibrillation, is now at that stage.

Kardium's Next Challenge

Kardium was founded in British Columbia in 2007 and has spent much of the time since developing technology to treat atrial fibrillation.

An earlier Globe mapping and ablation system reached commercial use in Europe in 2020. Kardium continued developing the technology, including a newer system using pulsed field ablation. That system went through further clinical study before the current Globe Pulsed Field System received U.S. FDA approval in 2025 and a Health Canada medical-device licence in July 2026.

Kardium is now undertaking a $125-million manufacturing expansion in Burnaby, with the federal government contributing up to $31.25 million. The project is intended to increase its cleanroom manufacturing capacity from about 500 units per year to as many as 30,000.

Burnaby is not intended to be Kardium's only manufacturing site. CEO Kevin Chaplin has said the company plans to open a second facility in Costa Rica by 2029, which would eventually supply the majority of its devices globally. The Burnaby expansion, meanwhile, is intended to retain intellectual property, technical expertise and high-value work in Canada.

The B.C. story, then, is not about manufacturing every device here. It is about how much of the capability built around a B.C.-developed technology can remain here as the company moves into international production.

Moving from 500 units of annual capacity to as many as 30,000 would be a 60-fold increase.

Getting there is not simply a matter of adding equipment or production lines. Kardium has to increase production while continuing to meet the manufacturing and regulatory requirements of a sophisticated medical device.

That is where the challenge changes.

The Challenge Of Manufacturing At Scale

Kardium provides a surprisingly specific example of how closely manufacturing and regulation can be connected.

In January 2026, the FDA approved a change in the type of laser welder used to manufacture a coupling subassembly at the end of Kardium's catheter shaft. The company was replacing one laser-welding technology with another.

To someone outside medical-device manufacturing, changing a piece of production equipment might sound like an internal factory decision. But for this regulated device, the change was significant enough to require an FDA submission and approval.

Now consider that level of control alongside a planned 60-fold increase in manufacturing capacity.

Kardium has to scale equipment, controlled facilities, suppliers, quality systems and a specialized workforce while continuing to meet the requirements attached to the approved device.

The federal government says the Burnaby project is expected to create and maintain up to 1,000 highly skilled jobs in B.C., without specifying how many would be new positions. It also follows a separate US$250-million financing Kardium completed in July 2025 to support commercial launch, manufacturing expansion and development of its commercial organization.

The challenge is not unique to Kardium. The National Research Council's 2026 evaluation of its Medical Devices Research Centre identified pilot-scale fabrication as a gap in Canada's medical-device ecosystem. It found limited capacity to help companies move from successful prototypes to the larger quantities needed for clinical validation and eventual industrial production.

A federal life-sciences task force has identified related barriers, including access to late-stage capital and the infrastructure companies need as they move toward commercialization.

Those gaps matter particularly in B.C. because the province already has a sizeable life-sciences sector producing technologies that may eventually face the same transition from development to scale.

The province says the sector includes about 2,000 companies and 20,000 workers and describes it as the fastest-growing life-sciences sector in Canada. Its economic strategy includes expanding advanced biomanufacturing, commercialization and sector employment.

B.C. also participates in international medical-device trade. Provincial research found the province accounted for 15 per cent of Canada's medical-instrument export value in 2022, behind Ontario and Quebec.

The opportunity, then, is not only to produce more medical innovation in B.C. It is to build more of the capability required to take that innovation further.

Why It Matters

Medical innovation ultimately matters because of what it can do for people. New devices, treatments and technologies can improve care, help people stay healthier and, in some cases, save lives. For B.C., there is also an economic opportunity when more of the work required to turn those innovations into commercial products happens here.

That work builds capabilities that can remain long after the original invention: specialized skills, intellectual property, manufacturing knowledge, supplier relationships and connections to international markets. Kardium's expansion provides one B.C. example of what it takes to move from developing and proving a medical technology to building the capacity to manufacture it at commercial scale.

B.C. has already shown that it can invent medical technology. Building the capacity to manufacture it at scale is another part of the opportunity.

By Sherri Claydon | Vancouver City News

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sherriclaydon

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