Operational Readiness. Our Operations group is an integral part of readying Boston Scientific for any product launch. The TAXUS product challenged this group on many fronts. While the process for manufacturing stents and balloons was already in place, producing drug-eluting stents required implementing the technology and expertise necessary to work with paclitaxel and our Translute™ polymer. This challenge was successfully met by our Operations team.

What’s more, having set a standard in Europe, our manufacturing facility in Galway, Ireland is prepared to work alongside our Maple Grove, Minnesota facility for the launch of the TAXUS product in the United States. We are also well on our way to establishing our key manufacturing goals: building a capacity capable of supplying a 75 percent worldwide market share, and setting up two vertically integrated manufacturing facilities to provide critical redundancy and surge capacity. This provides us with two sources for critical materials, bare stent manufacturing, stent delivery systems, drug coating, and the analytical testing of our product.