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Poly Implant Prothèse

Poly Implant Prothèse
Industry Prosthetics
Fate Liquidation in 2011
Founded 1991 (1991)
Headquarters La Seyne-sur-Mer, France
Key people
Jean-Claude Mas (President)
Number of employees
120
Website www.pipfrance.fr

Poly Implant Prothèse (PIP) was a French company founded in 1991 that produced silicone gel breast implants. The company was preemptively liquidated in 2010 following the revelation that they had been illegally manufacturing and selling breast implants made from cheaper industrial-grade silicone since 2001 (instead of the mandated medical-grade silicone they had previously used). The hundreds of thousands of unapproved implants sold globally by PIP from 2001 to 2010 were found to have a 500% higher risk of rupturing or leaking than approved models, as well as being implicated in at several deaths due to systemic toxicity and several cases of induced breast cancer. The scandal, which produced fears of a massive health disaster, prompted a full recall of the company's implants by the French health ministry in 2010, by which time the company was already defunct.

PIP was founded in 1991 by the Frenchman Jean-Claude Mas, born in 1939, a former butcher and later medical sales representative for the Bristol Myers company for 15 years. Mas had previously teamed up with plastic surgeon Henri Arion, who had introduced breast implants to France in 1965. After Arion died in a plane crash, Mas went on alone and launched PIP in 1991.

Starting in 1991, the company produced approximately 2 million sets of silicone breast implants over a 20-year period. The implants were exported to Latin American countries such as Brazil,Venezuela and Argentina, Western European markets including Britain (25 000), Germany, Spain and Italy, as well as Australia (8900).

Following the FDA ruling in 2000 which banned silicone breast implants in the US market (leading to a slump in sales worldwide), Mas sought to "tighten PIP's belt" and recoup some of its lost market share by severely cutting costs. In particular, Mas was credited with the idea that by switching PIP's silicone from externally purchased medical-grade to in-house produced industrial-grade, huge savings (on the order of 90%) could be generated that would ensure profits remained high no matter the market. As one PIP engineer later noted, this decision involved a relatively small change in the formula for the silicone, enough so that only superficial differences in the end product were noted. However, none of the relevant regulations were followed for manufacturing medical implants, and no pre-launch tests were conducted.


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