Advanced Sterilization Products Brand Guidelines: STERRAD, Irvine and the Move to Fortive

A hydrogen peroxide idea and an Irvine campus.

Advanced Sterilization Products, usually shortened to ASP, tells its own origin story briefly. The company says a group of scientists at a company in Texas pioneered the idea of using hydrogen peroxide to sterilise medical devices, and that this business formally became Advanced Sterilization Products in 1987. Its first system, the STERRAD 100 steriliser, received clearance from the US Food and Drug Administration in 1993, ASP says.

For most of its history ASP was part of Johnson & Johnson. In December 2010 the Orange County Business Journal described it as an Irvine-based unit of the New Brunswick, New Jersey, group, sitting within J&J’s Ethicon division. The paper reported that ASP ran sales and administration, manufacturing, research and development and training from a single complex of about 111,600 square feet in the Irvine Spectrum, with around 400 employees there, and that it sold mainly through its own sales force and hospital buying groups, with independent representatives handling the Middle East. That year, the paper added, ASP introduced a group of products for use with the STERRAD NX, a compact steriliser intended for operating rooms.

The unit also bought into Europe. In December 2009 the same paper reported that ASP’s French affiliate had acquired Gloster Europe, a company founded in 1999 that made portable devices sold under the Sterinis name, which spray a dry mist of hydrogen peroxide on surfaces in hospital rooms and operating theatres. ASP’s worldwide president said at the time that it planned to sell those devices in the United States as well.

Gas plasma, endoscopes and monitoring.

The name most closely tied to ASP is STERRAD. The company describes the method as low-temperature sterilisation: hydrogen peroxide vapour is diffused into the chamber, and the molecules are then excited by electromagnetic energy into a plasma state. In 2010 a sterile-processing manager at St. Joseph Hospital in Orange told the Orange County Business Journal that the hospital used six STERRAD machines across three departments for endoscopes and other instruments that cannot take the heat and pressure of steam.

ASP lists the later steps itself. It introduced the STERRAD NX in 2005 and the STERRAD 100NX in 2007, the EVOTECH endoscope cleaner and reprocessor in 2006, and the AEROFLEX automatic endoscope reprocessor in 2019. From 2023 it added steam-steriliser monitoring products under the BIOTRACE, VERISURE and SEALSURE names, and in 2024 it launched an ULTRA GI cycle for the 100NX, which ASP calls the first and only FDA-cleared hydrogen peroxide gas plasma terminal sterilisation method for duodenoscopes. Alongside the machines sit consumables: the CIDEX OPA disinfecting solutions, ENZOL and CIDEZYME detergents, and APTIMAX instrument trays.

The record also includes regulatory scrutiny. In May 2010 ASP received a warning letter from the FDA following a 2009 inspection, the Orange County Business Journal reported; the letter cited failures to verify design changes to its sterilisers and a lack of assurance that finished devices met certain requirements. ASP’s president told the paper the inquiry concerned process controls and that the company had no restrictions on its commercial activities. In April 2020 the FDA granted ASP an emergency use authorisation to use STERRAD systems to decontaminate N95 respirators; the agency said 9,930 systems were installed in 6,300 US hospitals, the paper reported that month.

Sterile processing as a visual world.

Sterilisation equipment is bought by hospital engineers, infection-control teams and the managers of sterile services departments — the rooms where used surgical instruments are washed, checked, packed and sterilised before they go back to the operating theatre. The makers describe their ranges in the order of that route. Getinge calls washer-disinfectors the first step in the reprocessing flow, then moves through sterilisers to the racks and trolleys that carry sterile goods back into the hospital.

The imagery of the category is practical rather than decorative: stainless-steel chambers, sliding or hinged chamber doors set into a wall, loading trolleys, wire baskets and instrument trays folded into blue sterilisation wrap. STERIS notes that its steam sterilisers are “often referred to as autoclaves” and sorts them by how many instrument trays fit in one load; Getinge groups its range into steam sterilisers, low-temperature sterilisers, loading equipment, and trays and baskets.

Many of the larger names grew by buying other companies, so their brands are layered. STERIS still sells steam sterilisers under the AMSCO name of the American Sterilizer Company, which it bought in 1996. Getinge folded Maquet, Atrium and other acquired names into a single Getinge brand in 2017, keeping some of them as product-family names. The makers in this set are based in the United States, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, Germany, Italy, Israel and China.

The trade meets at a few large fairs. MEDICA, the medical-technology fair, is held in Düsseldorf. In Dubai, the show founded in 1975 as Arab Health now runs as World Health Expo Dubai, a new name announced at its 50th edition, TradeArabia reported; its 2026 edition moved to Expo City Dubai, Gulf News reported.

From an Ethicon unit to a Fortive company.

The change of owner came at the end of the 2010s. In June 2018 Fortive, the industrial technology group spun off from Danaher in July 2016 and based in Everett, Washington, made a binding offer to buy ASP from Johnson & Johnson, English Wikipedia says, citing BioSpace; the deal closed in April 2019, it says, citing a Fortive announcement on Business Wire. The Orange County Business Journal reported in April 2020 that ASP then employed about 700 people, most of them at its home base in Irvine, and that it had been expanding around the Spectrum area.

Inside Fortive, ASP describes itself as an operating company in the group’s Infection Prevention Group, and it now gives its size as more than 1,700 employees across more than 40 countries, with more than 20,000 STERRAD systems installed worldwide. Those are the company’s own figures. Its website is organised around three areas, terminal sterilisation, sterilisation monitoring and high-level disinfection, with a separate STERRAD model for scientific and industrial users.

On its own website ASP is the company name, and the product families are written in capitals with trademark symbols, STERRAD, CIDEX, EVOTECH and BIOTRACE among them. The descriptive name Advanced Sterilization Products, which the company says it took in 1987, appears in the 2009 and 2010 reports from its Johnson & Johnson years and remains in use under Fortive.

For a design guide, Advanced Sterilization Products shows how an engineering name can sit behind a set of capitalised product marks. Compare STERIS, another maker of sterile-processing equipment, and Cantel Medical, another US name in infection prevention. For this guide we use a deep blue, a navy and a pale mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Advanced Sterilization Products’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.