Circular Design of Medical Devices

About Jesper Bøgelund

Novo Nordisk is a global healthcare company with 97 years of innovation and leadership in diabetes care. This heritage has given us experience and capabilities that also enable us to help people defeat other serious chronic diseases: haemophilia, growth disorders and obesity. Our key purpose is to prevent the rise of type 2 diabetes and obesity, discover and develop better biological medicines, manufacture them to meet increasing global demand and make them accessible wherever they are needed.

In Novo Nordisk we also develop device solutions to fit our medicines. We apply a multidisciplinary approach including anthropology based user research, requirement based engineering and industrial design as well as digital and connectivity based solutions enhancing treatment compliance and disease control. This way we have a high degree of control over the product design all the way from the business model, supply chain, production and distribution setup to the end of life of the products. This places us in a good position to design products which will be fit for a circular economy as it evolves.

With a university background in environmental and materials chemistry Jesper Bøgelund have worked as research scientist, consultant, lecturer and Materials Expert within polymer based products for 20 years. For more than 10 years he has been a returning speaker at Danish conferences and seminars on various polymer related topics like accelerated ageing, radiation resistance, sustainability and bioplastics.

Since 2013 he has been responsible for the environmental stewardship of the device research and development in Novo Nordisk, an area that experienced a huge increase in focus with a new corporate wide environmental strategy in 2019.  Following the strategy work, his team developed the current design guidelines used in Novo Nordisk device development to make sure to meet the targets of 50% reduction of the corporate environmental impact by 2030.