Most robotic surgery devices today are hulking pieces of machinery that reach, crane-like, into a patient’s body from the outside. A new Nebraska surgical device startup is building a robotic surgery platform that’s meant to be minimally invasive – though, interestingly, it works from the inside out.
Virtual Incision Corporation‘s robot features a small, self-contained surgical device that’s inserted in its entirety through a single incision in the patient’s abdomen. It just closed an $11.2 Series A-2 round for its investigational device that morphs open surgical procedures into minimally invasive operations.
“Our unit can be inserted into the abdomen, so it enables the surgeon to have the strength and reach and dexterity to perform the surgery with a robot, using a console at the bedside,” CEO John Murphy told MedCity News. “The unit moves in a dextrous way similar to the way your arms would move.”
The idea is to make this unit mobile, so it can be moved from OR to OR – and doesn’t require any special retrofitting to work in any given hospital. It allows surgeons to use techniques they’re already familiar with, Murphy said, and because of the device’s smaller size it will likely be cheaper than other robotic surgery tools currently on the market.
Minimally invasive surgeries offer several benefits: Less pain, shorter hospital stays, a smaller amount of scarring, blood loss and tissue injury, and in many cases, higher accuracy. Robotic surgery is taking hold as a preferred option over manual, open surgery. Virtual Incision’s device is meant to be a next-gen improvement on, say, the game-changing but decade-old DaVinci robot.
The new dollars will go toward the first human feasibility study of the company’s miniaturized robotic surgery tool for colon resection. There’s a need to improve upon this surgery, Murphy said – because the current practice involves creating an eight to 12-inch incision, which takes up to six weeks to heal.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Colon resection is used to treat conditions like Crohn’s disease, diverticulitis and colon cancer; because it’s rather complicated, robotic surgery isn’t traditionally an option here, and manual laparoscopic surgery is only used a third of the time, the company says.
The round was led by Bluestem Capital, though existing investors such as PrairieGold Venture Partners participated in the financing. The company is a spinout of the University of Nebraska.
Should the feasibility studies go well, the company will look to raise additional funding to go through the regulatory 510K process in the U.S. and the CE Mark process in Europe.
“The technology is really coming quite soon – probably in the next year or two,” Murphy said. “This area of robotically assisted surgical devices is tremendous, and here to stay.”
