Delaware companies make products that improve race car performance, keep us and our pets healthy, help Navy divers breathe underwater and let humans function in space. Stuff made in Delaware ranges from things that go right to the end user, like animal vaccines or space suits, to components that end up in other products (for example, enzymes that make food taste better). Here are a few examples.
Tastier Cheese
DowDuPont
Wilmington-headquartered DowDuPont helps make the world’s food products healthier and tastier for consumers. For example, DowDuPont’s Danisco unit produces protease, peptidase and lipase enzymes that give a cheese’s natural flavors an effective boost. In the feta cheese seen here, Danisco’s Lipase 600 helps reduce bitterness, aids ripening time and intensifies flavors.
Wi-Fi in Flight
W.L. Gore
Known for its high-performance sports fabrics and apparel, such as Gore-Tex, W.L. Gore also makes many other products that have great consumer applications. For example, Gore cable assemblies keep you connected with Wi-Fi and entertained when you fly, wherever in the world you are traveling. These innovative cables are smaller and lighter in weight, plus they fit into existing spaces within planes that are being retrofitted. This reduces aircraft weight and, as a result, improves fuel efficiency.
Performance Auto Parts
Mishimoto
New Castle-based Mishimoto is the world leader in performance cooling products for everyday driving, for the racing circuit and for bikes and trucks. That includes under-the-hood items such as this 100% aluminum expansion tank that is direct-fitted for a Ford Focus and can withstand repeated temperature transitions. The sight tube allows for proper hot and cold coolant levels, while an internal baffle keeps coolant near the overflow port during aggressive driving, preventing air from getting into the coolant system. The tank comes in designer colors – wrinkle nitrous blue, wrinkle red or a black powder-coated finish.
Animal Vaccines
Merck Animal Health
Merck Animal Health does research on animal well-being and makes medicines for both commercial and domestic animals. These include many vaccines, infection-fighting and anti-parasitic medicines, and products that can improve fertility. Merck’s Innovax-ND-IBD vaccine, already in use in Europe and with approval in the U.S. expected soon, will protect against three highly transmittable diseases in poultry – infectious bursal disease, Newcastle disease and Marek’s disease. Another high-profile project is Merck’s program to try to eliminate rabies worldwide. Each year, about 60,000 people die from rabies, the company says, and 40 percent of those are children under the age of 15.
Space Suits & Habitats
ILC Dover
ILC Dover’s flexible performance materials for space suits were used by astronauts who first explored the moon back in the 1960s. Other famous products include landing bags for the Mars Rover and blimp-like platforms that have military uses. And when humans are ready to go to Mars, Federica-based ILC Dover will be ready with inflatable structures and space habitats, air-locks and shelters for use in earth orbit and for planetary exploration.
Opioid Disposal Bags
DEact Medical Solutions
Trevor Brown, founder of the two-year-old DEact Medical Solutions, is getting ready to take his company’s first product – opioid disposal bags – from market testing to product launch. The disposal bags use DEact’s patent-pending technology to make drugs safe to throw away in normal trash containers. Customers can simply put the medicines into the bag and add tap water, creating a solid, gel-like substance that won’t harm the environment and can’t be abused by opioid addicts. The DEact pouches are four inches wide and eight inches long and are designed to fit inside pharmacy bags.
Particle Separators
Advanced Materials Technology
Wilmington-based Advanced Materials Technology is a leader in high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), a chemistry technique that can separate, identify and quantify each component in a mixture. AMT’s HALO HPLC and UHPLC columns help researchers quickly collect data related to the manufacture of pharmaceutical and biological products, drug testing for job applicants or professional athletes, or medical testing of blood and other body fluids.
Military Gloves
Masley Enterprise
As a three-time Olympian in the luge competition, Frank Masley knows about extreme conditions. His company, Masley Enterprises, manufactures tough-wearing gloves used primarily by the military and by police forces. Perhaps the toughest of them all is the barbed-wire-handler glove, designed for use with the wire and other sharp objects encountered by the military. The glove is made of thick, cow-split leather and steel staples.
Malted Grains
Proximity Malt
There are now more than 20 craft breweries in Delaware, plus thousands of individual home breweries. Proximity Malt’s malt house in Laurel sources local and regional grain to provide those brewers with locally grown, sustainable and consistently malted grains. Proximity works with its contract farmers to develop the optimal barley varieties that work with this region’s environments, and to integrate these grains into its malting systems.
Underwater Breathing
Micropore
Micropore experimented for several years to come up with what has now become its signature product, the ExtendAir CO2 absorbent cartridge. The U.S. Navy uses ExtendAir to help its divers’ oxygen last longer in critical underwater situations. With the help of computer-aided flow analysis and in-house lab equipment, Micropore meets the Navy’s design goals.
Biotech Intermediates
Adesis
Early on, Adesis developed chemicals that led its owner, University Display Technology, to become world leader in OLED (organic light emitting diode) technology that powers smart phone and TV displays. Today, when companies that make new drugs – or other chemical or biotech products – need specialized ingredients, they call Adesis. Adesis produces custom compounds that are not otherwise commercially available – anything from a couple of milligrams to several kilos’ worth.
Laser Therapy
LiteCure
Star athletes often sustain serious muscle injuries that need quick treatment, including deep-muscle tissue therapy, and LiteCure’s LightForce therapy lasers are designed to help them. But you might injure a muscle just getting off the couch, so the Newark-based company’s lasers have quickly become standard equipment in medical facilities. LiteCure’s products use light sources such as lasers, light-emitting diodes and broadband light to alleviate pain and inflammation, while promoting wound healing and tissue regeneration. It even works on pets: LiteCure also has a veterinary line of therapy lasers to treat animal injuries.
Airplane Parts and Interiors
ALOFT AeroArchitects
The Georgetown-based company outfits airplanes for both civilian air traffic and the U.S. Air Force. It installs important operational parts, like auxiliary fuel systems, but can also turn a plane into a luxurious living space complete with in-flight entertainment systems, bedrooms, bars and workspaces with in-flight wi-fi. The interior fixtures Aloft uses are designed, made and installed in Delaware, but the company’s clients stretch far beyond the First State, into Europe and Asia.
