Where & #039;s Robotic-Assisted Surgery Headed?

Will Intuitive Surgical’s da Vinci system be dethroned as the industry leader? Can one robotic platform handle all surgeries? Will autonomous robots take over in surgery? These topics and more were tackled during MD&M East’s June 12 panel discussion, “Robotic Surgery - Visions of the Future.” Led by Shana Leonard, Informa Markets’s vice president of content, the panel featured Gianluca De Novi, PhD, CEO at XSurgical; Anthony Fernando, Chief Operating Officer & CTO at TransEnterix; and Dave Saunders, chief technology officer at Galen Robotics. “When you really look at the industry, there’s probably 40, 50 surgical robots that are actually out there,” said Saunders. “Intuitive Surgical fills a niche, and they make a lot of money doing it for abdominal and urological surgeries. There are lots of things that the da Vinci does not and cannot do. . . . There are lots of surgeries that are very specific to how my technology is optimized that I don’t think da Vinci would ever be appropriate for either. And they don’t have an incentive to optimize their technology for the kinds of areas I’m going after because it would amount to overengineering. . . . And if we look at the recent acquisition of Auris by Johnson & Johnson, that robot does a very spec...
Source: MDDI - Category: Medical Devices Authors: Tags: Business Source Type: news