An American company is currently working on the development of mini-robots allowing surgeons to operate remotely with greater freedom of movement inside your body.
Imagine an operating room. Doctors prepare a patient for surgery, make a small incision in the abdomen and insert a small robot while hundreds of miles away a surgeon puts on a virtual reality headset, grabs his controllers and prepares to operate . This kind of approach might sound like science fiction. An American startup would like to make it a reality.
Vicarious Surgical is a young company based in Charlestown, Massachusetts, founded by Adam Sachs and Sammy Khalifa. The two MIT alumni have been working on this project since earning their PhDs about five years ago.
In recent years, they have sought to develop and miniaturize mini-robots armed with two arms and a head equipped with a camera capable of operating at inside the human body. From a distance, a surgeon wearing a virtual reality headset could then control said robots without the inconvenience of limiting his movements around the incision sites. This surgeon, points out to TechCrunch Adam Sachs, “could be in another room or hundreds of miles away (provided you have a great internet connection)” .
Over the past few years, the two engineers' project has attracted the curiosity of several investors, such as Bill Gates via his Gates Frontier fund, Khosla Ventures, Eric Schmidt's Innovation Endeavors, or AME Cloud Ventures (investment company of Yahoo founder Jerry Yang). In total, the company has raised nearly $32 million to support the development of its technology. And for good reason, the market for medical robots is very lucrative, estimated at around 90 billion dollars , according to a report by Allied Market Research.
This type of approach could be widely applicable in areas that are likely to yield faster results than precision surgery. But for the two engineers, it was important to first tackle the health market to make a difference from a technological point of view, but also from a social point of view.
“Minimally invasive surgeries and surgical robotics are indeed the future and it has only just begun” , says Dror Berman, CEO of Innovation Endeavors. “There were 900,000 surgeries performed using surgical robotics out of a total of 313 million surgeries. It is a small percentage and it is very expensive to buy them… In general, it is not offered to the vast majority of patients. Vicarious is about democratizing this access” .
In the longer term, Vicarious Surgical would like its technology to become accessible not only to large hospitals in the United States, but also to small towns and villages in rural areas of the United States. and all over the world. In the meantime, the company is testing its miniature robots virtually and in labs. According to TechCrunch , she would not have liked to say whether or not she used animal subjects.
