Updates on Vicarious Surgical

 

"Bill Gates-backed Vicarious Surgical, which is set to go public in a SPAC deal, hopes to reach $1 billion in revenue by 2027 as it takes on the goliath of surgical robots. 

Vicarious Surgical cofounders—Sammy Khalifa, the company’s chief technology officer, and Dr. Barry Greene, its chief medical officer—have spent the past decade developing an itty-bitty robot paired with a VR headset for abdominal surgeries that they hope to bring to market in 2023. Its two arms and camera are designed to enter the patient’s belly through an incision of less than an inch and operate in all directions once there. Shrinking a surgical robot down is exceptionally difficult, but by doing so the Vicarious trio hopes to help doctors perform abdominal surgeries, starting with hernia operations, faster, safer and with fewer complications than existing alternatives.

It’s not exactly the sci-fi stuff of the movie, in which doctors are injected into the patient’s bloodstream, but it’s futuristic enough that Vicarious has attracted A-list investors including Bill Gates, Vinod Khosla, Eric Schmidt and Jerry Yang. It has also received a breakthrough designation from the FDA—the first for a surgical robot—making it eligible for priority review.

“Putting the elbow down inside the body cavity and being able to reach back and work toward the abdominal wall is a pretty big deal,” says Paul Hermes, who ran Medtronic’s robotics program and is now an advisor to Vicarious. “We should expect robotic surgery to get better.”

The company is set to go public via a merger with a SPAC set up by Hong Kong investor Donald Tang. The $1.1 billion deal will raise $115 million and bring in medical-technology giant Becton Dickinson, which makes the surgical mesh used in hernia repairs, as an investor. It forecasts reaching $1 billion in annual revenue by 2027.

“We’re going after the markets where existing surgical robots have struggled,” says Sachs, 30. “There are a lot of copycats out there aiming at the incumbent. They have the same challenges. . . . Our architecture is just totally different.”

The behemoth in robotic surgery is $115 billion (market cap) Intuitive Surgical, which introduced the da Vinci, a large four-armed robot that holds sticklike instruments, two decades ago and has dominated the space ever since. As Intuitive’s patents expire and robotic technology advances, competitors including J&J and Medtronic, both of which have acquired surgical-robot startups, are vying to make robotic surgery as common as laparoscopy. The Vicarious robot’s expected price of around $1.2 million, roughly half that of existing topline robots, could be a factor in its favor, as could the ease with which surgeons can learn how to use it.

Hernia repair, the first market Vicarious is targeting, is a huge one, with more than 2 million procedures a year in the U.S. Ventral hernias, common along the midline of the abdominal wall, account for 500,000 procedures and are highly complex. Standard repair involves attaching mesh to the abdominal wall, but it results in recurrence about 20% of the time, often requiring a more extensive fix. An advanced technique that involves tucking the mesh up against the rectus abdominis muscle reduces recurrence, but it’s difficult and can take up to four hours with current robots.

When Vicarious received the FDA breakthrough designation, it could perform this surgery in a cadaver in about half the time, Sachs says, and it has since cut that to under one hour. In a video demonstration of a ventral hernia repair, the Vicarious robot’s arms push mesh into the abdominal cavity and then quickly sew it up. The shorter surgery is less risky for patients and more cost-effective for hospitals.

Vicarious’ ambitions extend to other abdominal surgeries, including gallbladder procedures, for a total potential market of 39 million surgeries (only 3% of these are done with robots). That’s why Sachs, whose stake in Vicarious is worth $112 million, figures it needs just a fraction of the market to create a large company.

“The field has been pretty stagnant for a long time, and there is accepted wisdom that isn’t true,” says Tang, the SPAC investor. “You need to get this in the hands of people to show that it’s possible and it’s not a pipe dream.”" 

 Source: Forbes