In 1989, Retractable's founder, Thomas J. Shaw, saw a television news segment about a doctor who had contracted HIV from an accidental needlestick injury. The doctor complained that design engineers were insensitive and unresponsive to the dangers faced daily by frontline healthcare workers.

Shaw, a mechanical and structural engineer, was struck by the doctor's criticism and felt compelled to act. After spending a year developing preliminary design concepts, Shaw was awarded a $50,000 grant by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a subsidiary of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to further develop his design concepts. Later he was awarded a $600,000 grant to commercialize the production of one of his retractable syringe designs and to produce 10,000 samples for clinical trials.