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Adam Savage of MythBusters swallowing a PillBot. | Supply: Savage’s YouTube
Image a nuclear-powered surgical robotic concentrating on glioblastoma. Or think about hijacking a botfly larva to carry out delicate inside interventions. These eventualities could sound far out, however Endiatx CEO Torrey Smith talks about them as if describing an bold dwelling enchancment venture — difficult however totally possible with the proper method and instruments.
Although these eventualities sound like they had been plucked from science fiction, they aren’t mere fantasies for Smith, who delivered the closing keynote at RoboBusiness 2024. For all his daring long-term ambitions, nonetheless, Smith’s actual focus is on the PillBot, an ingestible robotic at the moment present process scientific trials.
This swallowable, camera-equipped capsule is designed to navigate the abdomen below a health care provider’s distant management, capturing real-time photographs that might quickly change some invasive endoscopies.
The cinematic connections to his work aren’t any coincidence. Smith famous that he attracts inspiration from each the ache and tragedy he’s witnessed amongst family members and private connections and basic science fiction — from the unnerving ear-entering parasites of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan to the autonomous arm-equipped pods of the HAL-controlled ship in 2001: A House Odyssey and the miniaturized journey within the 1987 sci-fi journey movie Innerspace.
“For a complete profession of profitable medical system startups, I used to be simply making a replica of another person’s system. … You get to a degree the place you begin to ask your self, do you need to spend the remainder of your life making different folks’s goals come true?”
Smith’s profession spans a number of profitable medical system improvements, every representing strategic market positions in interventional healthcare. His nine-year improvement of an atherectomy system for arterial plaque removing addressed a considerable market sector in cardiovascular intervention.
Smith then spent two years designing a vapor ablation system for endometrial procedures—a expertise that may later turn out to be normal in minimally invasive gynecological remedies. His work on vascular closure programs tackled a essential want in catheterization procedures, the place speedy hemostasis can cut back affected person restoration time from hours to minutes.
Whereas commercially profitable, these ventures adopted a longtime sample of strategic market entry. Smith famous that he then made a strategic pivot towards extra disruptive innovation.
Shifting from incremental refinements to technological leaps and important private {and professional} dangers. Early on, he stated he knew that credibility can be hard-won when looking for press protection for a swallowable robotic.
“Are these guys actual? Are they simply one other set of jokers? I really feel like we had been on the razor’s edge,” he recalled.
Armed with an unconventional imaginative and prescient, Endiatx didn’t have the posh of a well-trodden path. As a substitute, the firm constructed its popularity from scratch. Exhausting work, scrappy innovation, and the regular accrual of technical experience have propelled Endiatx past preliminary skepticism, stated Smith.
In the present day, he stated his workforce is not any mere curiosity—it has remodeled from a fledgling operation making incremental good points right into a critical contender aiming to redefine what’s doable in medical robotics.
From Tesla coils to a swallowable robotic
The PillBot is.billed because the ‘world’s first low-cost, remote-controlled tablet for endoscopy.’ | Supply: Endiatx
Considering massive is nothing new for Smith. Earlier than founding Endiatx, he demonstrated his penchant for large-scale experimental initiatives within the Nevada desert.
“I based a Burning Man theme camp known as ‘Sextant.’ We constructed a 30-foot, million-volt Tesla coil,” he recalled. “We had a giant tower with a café midway up, and from the highest, you could possibly trip a zipper line throughout a metropolis block.”
These sizable installations taught him that turning impossible-seeming goals into bodily actuality was greater than an inventive thrill—it was a self-discipline Smith might wield professionally.
“Doing all that, I noticed there’s a distinction between what you do as a pastime and as an expert,” he stated.
Smith described his choice to create Sextant as uniting “a gaggle of doers—individuals who will go to nice lengths to construct insane issues.”
That quest for crazy-seeming tech is current in Smith’s present focus past abdomen endoscopy. He stated he envisions an period of ultra-miniaturized surgical robots—tiny gadgets on the order of a grain of rice that might roam the physique, performing interventions at a microscopic scale.
“Perhaps it could possibly be just like the 2001 house pod—little robotic arms that come out,” he stated. A compact future iteration of the PillBot would possibly goal mind most cancers, Smith predicted.
A nighttime seize of twin resonant transformer, or Tesla coils, flanking an illuminated central tower at Burning Man’s Sextant Camp. | Photographer credit score: Duncan Rawlinson, by way of LinkedIn
A imaginative and prescient of robots smaller than rice grains
The drive to push the bounds of robotic scale is clear within the imaginative and prescient for “Microsurgeon” gadgets, as Smith envisions them, which might depend on customized silicon chips and MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical programs) instead of normal circuit boards and batteries.
Smith acknowledged that lithium-ion chemistry will not be suited to this scale: “Lithium-ion will not be going to scale like that.” As a substitute, he’s investigating nuclear beta-voltaic batteries—a expertise that harnesses the regular trickle of electrons emitted by a tiny radioactive supply.
“What you want is a beta particle emitter — mainly a nuclear photo voltaic cell,” he defined. “Some type of nuclear battery is on the horizon.”
Understandably, the thought of implanting a nuclear-powered micro-robot would possibly elevate considerations about radiation publicity. However Smith was fast to place it into perspective: “If we will … defend and lure [the radiation] in order that it simply turns into an imperceptible quantity of warmth, hopefully it’d be capable of say it’s like much less radiation than consuming a banana.”
And the quantity of gasoline would simply be a “fleck.” Smith cited established makes use of of radioactive seeds in oncology, which have been safely implanted in sufferers to deal with prostate most cancers. By comparability, a tiny, well-shielded nuclear battery could possibly be no extra harmful than on a regular basis environmental exposures, he stated.
Endiatx ventures into uncharted endoscopy territory
For now although, Smith’s ambition is concentrated on an easier but nonetheless significant aim: rethinking normal higher endoscopy.
“Proper now, for an higher endoscopy: you have got abdomen ache, perhaps you go to the ER, then major care, then GI, then perhaps remedy trials, a number of visits, and ultimately you get an endoscopy that takes 5 minutes to diagnose one thing like gastritis,” he defined. “That’s tens of 1000’s of {dollars} for one thing that could possibly be performed in a couple of minutes.”
In contrast, Smith stated his imaginative and prescient is to make the diagnostic course of a easy affair. “Might we perhaps flip a few months of visits to the hospital right into a Zoom name?” he requested.
The journey from prototype to medical system isn’t easy. Smith stated the present era of PillBots is less complicated to regulate in a fish tank than in a human abdomen. Smith himself has swallowed these prototypes repeatedly—71 occasions.
In October, Smith swallowed one of many tablets dwell onstage at RoboBusiness in Santa Clara, Calif. Attendees had the chance to observe dwell video from Smith’s abdomen as he mentioned the system.
The day after Thanksgiving, he would swallow three extra in a single session below the steering of Vivek Kumbhari, M.D., Ph.D., a distinguished gastroenterologist and Endiatx co-founder. Gastroenterologist and hepatologist Treta Purohit, M.D., and emergency room doctor Benjamin Bonnes, M.D., additionally took turns controlling the swallowable robotic.
A possible ‘fountain of knowledge’
As 2024 attracts to an in depth, Endiatx has ongoing scientific trials for PillBot 1.0 in New Zealand. In the meantime, improvement of PillBot 2.0—what Smith calls its “racehorse” mannequin—is accelerating, centered on dramatic dimension discount by new battery expertise and smaller motors. The aim is to realize impartial buoyancy, not like the present negatively buoyant model.
By integrating enhancements from PillBot 1.0 with these superior capabilities in 2.0 by late 2025, Endiatx goals to redefine gastrointestinal diagnostics. With $9 million raised, the corporate is positioning itself for what Smith describes as a “Google of healthcare-level alternative.”
PillBot builds on established trajectories in ingestible medical system expertise. The sector dates again to the primary radio-frequency capsule in 1957, which transmitted fundamental physiological knowledge.
A key milestone was Given Imaging’s PillCam, FDA-approved in 2001, the primary commercially viable capsule endoscopy platform. Market consolidation adopted as Covidien acquired Given Imaging in 2014 for $860 million, and Medtronic finally built-in these property after merging with Covidien in 2015.
This lineage validated capsule endoscopy for visualizing the small gut and diagnosing situations like gastrointestinal bleeding and inflammatory bowel illness. Endiatx is getting into a market section that features established gamers corresponding to Medtronic’s PillCam and newer magnetically actuated programs like Navicam.
| Situation/Facility Kind | Common Value | Value Vary | Supply |
|---|---|---|---|
| Normal Common | $2,750 | $1,250 – $4,800 | New Selection Well being |
| Outpatient Facilities | $2,550 | $1,286 – $2,850 | New Selection Well being |
| Hospitals (inpatient) | $4,350 | $3,500 – $10,000 | New Selection Well being |
| Uninsured Sufferers | N/A | $1,500 – $10,000 | GI Endoscopy Observe |
| California (outpatient) | $1,850 | $1,286 – $2,850 | Sidecar Well being |
| With Insurance coverage (affected person share) | Is determined by plan | Deductibles & co-insurance | GI Endoscopy Observe |
Endiatx operations evolve
To realize its objectives, Endiatx has invested closely in in-house capabilities. The corporate’s workforce operates its personal clear room, performs RF evaluation, and even acquired an Arburg injection molding machine off eBay. It was an arduous, year-long journey of half replacements and studying electro-mechanical nuances. Now, Endiatx is constructing its personal tooling.
“We had been mainly figuring out of homes,” Smith recollects of the early days. In the present day, Endiatx’s more and more subtle facility displays the corporate’s development from advert hoc prototyping to real manufacturing readiness. Controlling manufacturing processes might be essential as they scale, guaranteeing each high quality and cost-effectiveness.
This dual-panel visualization quantifies the operational and monetary implications of PillBot expertise in gastrointestinal diagnostics, in line with Endiatx.
Endiatx displays at conferences, Amazon’s MARS
Strategic outreach and public demonstrations have amplified Endiatx’s trajectory. An invite to Amazon MARS, an elite Jeff Bezos–hosted convention specializing in machine studying, automation, robotics, and house, proved a turning level.
A dwell demonstration through which Endiatx co-founder Alex Luebke, MD, swallowed a PillBot onstage impressed attendees sufficiently that phrase reached TED organizers simply weeks earlier than their convention. TED rapidly provided Endiatx a slot, enabling one other dwell demonstration that led to elevated investor engagement.
Smith stated an in depth affiliate’s afamily member had died from abdomen most cancers after avoiding typical endoscopy. “There’s no actual loser right here [with PillBot] besides abdomen most cancers,” Smith stated.
The corporate’s extra futuristic-sounding ideas, from nuclear-powered surgical robots to bio-inspired interventional gadgets, might sound distant, however they align with a lot of Silicon Valley’s challenges of the established order. If the corporate succeeds in someday making robots the scale of a grain of rice, it’s unlikely to cease there.
“Sometime, there might be nanobots,” Smith asserted. “It’s inevitable — it’s only a query of when and who’s going to do it.”
In recent times, enterprise capital has cooled on Silicon Valley, whereas cities like Austin, Miami, and Seattle lure startups. However the area continues to be a drive to be reckoned with thanks partially to its instructional acumen and engineering expertise.
“We constructed Endiatx in my front room, and I’m decided to point out the world that magic nonetheless exists in Silicon Valley,” stated Smith.
One other Hollywood film to discover the idea of robots traversing the physique is Incredible Voyage, a 1966 flick. | Supply: James Vaughan by way of Flickr (below Inventive Commons license)
Editor’s observe: This text was syndicated from The Robotic Report sibling publication R&D World.
