A HEREFORD company has won the Queen's Award for leading the way in designing and supplying medical packaging that help save lives.

Dyecor, based at Whitestone Business Park, has developed a new product which will enable temperature-controlled drugs, stem cell material and even transplant organs to be transported more efficiently.

It has won the Queen's Award for Enterprise for Innovation with the official award ceremony taking place on July 28.

The company specialises in absorbancy, specialist paper conversion and sachet manufacture and its latest product is based on Thermacor, a patented, thermoformed package suitable for transporting liquid specimens.

This has already proved highly successful for medical applications.

Dyecor owner and managing director, Rod Davidson, said an idea to create an absorbent moulding process to carry diagnostic samples such as blood and urine took off when there was a huge public health awareness campaign for chlamydia and the company produced a product for transporting urine samples for testing.

Dyecor soon found that customers wanted containers that carried things in a chilled and temperature-controlled condition.

The company applied to the Advantage Proof of Concept fund last year and judges realised the exciting potential of the product for transporting organs.

MedilinkWM, which develops business networks for medical and healthcare companies, became involved to establish links with transplant surgeons at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham.

As a result Dyecor moulded a thermal reservoir, or close fitting box around a sample, which was able to contain a refrigerant.

Normally environmentallyunsound dry ice is used to send material in a chilled container.