Do You Have What It Takes to Become the Next Intuitive Surgical?

Intuitive Surgical set a high bar for new entrants. But there are opportunities today that new surgical robotics companies can take advantage of that Intuitive didn't have when the company started out more than two decades ago. A panel of experts spoke at MD&M West in Anaheim, CA this week about the process of developing medical robotic tools and the valuable lessons learned from watching Intuitive rise to the top. "In the year 2000, if Intuitive Surgical walked into a room and said 'we're going to be worth $60 billion in 20 years' nobody on the planet would have believed them. Nobody," said Leo Petrossian, co-founder and CEO of Los Angeles, CA-based Neural Analytics. His colleague on the panel, Thomas Low, chuckled in agreement. "That's what happened," Low said. "Still can't believe it." Today, Low is the director of robotics at Menlo Park, CA-based SRI International, but he has spent much of his career focused on effective telemanipulation of robotically-assisted surgery. He was a member of the development team that created Intuitive Surgical's da Vinci surgical system, and Google Verily's new Verb Surgical platform. Low defines robotics as the ability of a machine to manipulate its environment and adapt to what it discovers in that environment. "In reality, the robots that are now called surgical assistive robots, things like the daÂ...
Source: MDDI - Category: Medical Devices Authors: Tags: R & D Source Type: news