Today, the challenge extends far beyond device innovation alone. Success depends on the ability to manufacture high quality, patient-centric drug delivery devices at scale while maintaining the precision, reliability, and regulatory compliance these products demand.
Several factors play a role in accelerating this shift, including:
From hospital to home: Raising the bar on device design
As drug delivery continues its shift from hospitals and clinics to the home, the demands placed on delivery devices have fundamentally changed. Patients, not clinicians, are now the primary users of many therapies, making intuitive design, reliability, and consistent performance more important than ever. Devices must be easy to use, minimize injection anxiety and discomfort, and deliver every dose safely and accurately, regardless of who is administering the therapy.
At the same time, drug formulations are becoming more complex, creating new requirements for how therapies are delivered. Traditional spring-powered autoinjectors remain the preferred solution for many high-volume, fixed-dose therapies because of their simplicity, reliability, and familiarity. However, larger-volume biologics and high-viscosity drugs are driving the adoption of new delivery approaches, including advanced autoinjectors and wearable injectors capable of delivering therapies over extended periods. There is no single platform that fits every therapy. The optimal solution depends on trade-offs between drug formulation, delivery volume, therapy and dosing regimen, patient experience, system complexity, and cost.
Connectivity is also emerging as both a powerful differentiator and key enabler of improved adherence, patient insight, and outcome tracking. However, connected features must provide meaningful clinical and patient value without introducing unnecessary complexity or cost.
Self-administered therapies call for intuitive, human-centered design of devices that prioritize compact form factors and minimize injection anxiety and discomfort. It also requires consistent performance across millions of units, with high reliability and impeccable safety at the forefront.
This is where Flex operates — not just as a manufacturer, but as a strategic partner with a proven track record of helping the world’s leading pharmaceutical, medical device, and life sciences companies design, industrialize, and manufacture some of the most advanced delivery devices and connected health solutions in the market. With deep expertise in design, automation, and global manufacturing, Flex enables customers to bring innovative therapies to market faster and reliably produce them at the scale required to meet growing patient demand.
Why leading drug delivery and pharmaceutical companies choose Flex
Historically, value in drug delivery was concentrated in the device itself. Today, it is increasingly shifting toward the broader system required to bring that device to market as a combination product. Competitive advantage increasingly comes from the ability to seamlessly integrate product development, industrialization, manufacturing, and global supply chain execution into a single, scalable system. Flex does all of this while partnering with customers, either end‑to‑end or selectively, to complement their capabilities or support them with additional capacity and bandwidth where needed.
We help customers accelerate commercialization and bring healthcare innovation to patients through:
Speed to scale
Integrated design, engineering, supply chain, and manufacturing to compress the path from concept to global production and enable rapid ramp-up
Precision at high volume
Hundreds of millions of regulated healthcare devices annually with exceptional quality, reliability, and on-time delivery
Global scale and resilience
Regionalized production strategies that support local-for-local, in-region manufacturing and supply chain strategies, reliable execution in complex supply environments, and faster response to changing market demand
Regulatory and quality leadership
Robust and mature quality systems and extensive regulatory expertise supporting global development and manufacturing of healthcare products at scale
Combination product capabilities
End-to-end support for final assembly and integration of drug/device combination products, helping ensure quality, traceability, and regulatory alignment
For decades, Flex has connected these elements to help the world’s leading pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical technology companies transform complex concepts into commercially successful products. Flex supports the production and life cycle management of hundreds of millions of healthcare devices annually and recently received the prestigious 2025 PDA Drug Delivery Innovation Award for our collaboration with Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, on a connected autoinjector. We have a proven track record of helping customers navigate complexity, reduce risk, and scale more efficiently.
The opportunity ahead
The convergence of biologic therapies, advanced drug delivery systems, and home-based care represents one of healthcare’s most significant growth opportunities. As pipelines expand across metabolic diseases, oncology, immunology, and other chronic conditions, the need for advanced, scalable, patient-centric drug delivery solutions will continue to accelerate. With healthcare shifting toward personalized, home-based treatment of chronic conditions, the importance of convenient, reliable, high-quality drug delivery devices will increase as well.
The future of healthcare will require more than scientific breakthroughs. It will require manufacturing ecosystems capable of producing increasingly sophisticated combination products with the quality, speed, resilience, and scale that global healthcare systems demand.
The companies that lead the next generation of drug delivery will be those that successfully bridge innovation, patient-centered design, and industrialization. By integrating these capabilities from the earliest stages of development, they can reduce risk, accelerate commercialization timelines, and transform promising life-changing therapies into real-world impact for millions of patients around the world.
