Adam Savage of MythBusters swallowing a PillBot. | Supply: Savage’s YouTube
Image a nuclear-powered surgical robotic focusing 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 formidable house enchancment undertaking — difficult however totally possible with the proper method and instruments.
Although these eventualities sound like they have been plucked from science fiction, they don’t seem to be mere fantasies for Smith, who delivered the closing keynote at RoboBusiness 2024. For all his daring long-term ambitions, nevertheless, Smith’s actual focus is on the PillBot, an ingestible robotic at present present process medical trials.
This swallowable, camera-equipped capsule is designed to navigate the abdomen beneath a health care provider’s distant management, capturing real-time photos that might quickly substitute some invasive endoscopies.
The cinematic connections to his work are not any coincidence. Smith famous that he attracts inspiration from each the ache and tragedy he’s witnessed amongst family members and private connections and traditional 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 gadget startups, I used to be simply making a duplicate of another person’s gadget. … You get to some extent the place you begin to ask your self, do you need to spend the remainder of your life making different individuals’s goals come true?”
Smith’s profession spans a number of profitable medical gadget improvements, every representing strategic market positions in interventional healthcare. His nine-year improvement of an atherectomy system for arterial plaque elimination addressed a considerable market sector in cardiovascular intervention.
Smith then spent two years designing a vapor ablation gadget for endometrial procedures—a expertise that might later develop into customary in minimally invasive gynecological remedies. His work on vascular closure programs tackled a important want in catheterization procedures, the place fast hemostasis can scale 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 mentioned he knew that credibility can be hard-won when looking for press protection for a swallowable robotic.
“Are these guys actual? Are they only one other set of jokers? I really feel like we have been on the razor’s edge,” he recalled.
Armed with an unconventional imaginative and prescient, Endiatx didn’t have the luxurious of a well-trodden path. As an alternative, the firm constructed its repute from scratch. Arduous work, scrappy innovation, and the regular accrual of technical experience have propelled Endiatx past preliminary skepticism, mentioned Smith.
Immediately, he mentioned his crew isn’t any mere curiosity—it has remodeled from a fledgling operation making incremental good points right into a critical contender aiming to redefine what’s attainable in medical robotics.
From Tesla coils to a swallowable robotic
The PillBot is.billed because the ‘world’s first low-cost, remote-controlled capsule for endoscopy.’ | Supply: Endiatx
Considering massive is nothing new for Smith. Earlier than founding Endiatx, he demonstrated his penchant for large-scale experimental tasks within the Nevada desert.
“I based a Burning Man theme camp referred to 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 may journey a zipper line throughout a metropolis block.”
These sizable installations taught him that turning impossible-seeming goals into bodily actuality was greater than a creative 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 interest and as an expert,” he mentioned.
Smith described his resolution 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 mentioned he envisions an period of ultra-miniaturized surgical robots—tiny units on the order of a grain of rice that might roam the physique, performing interventions at a microscopic scale.
“Possibly it may very well be just like the 2001 area pod—little robotic arms that come out,” he mentioned. A compact future iteration of the PillBot may 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, through 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” units, as Smith envisions them, which might depend on customized silicon chips and MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical programs) instead of customary 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 an alternative, 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 concept of implanting a nuclear-powered micro-robot may increase issues about radiation publicity. However Smith was fast to place it into perspective: “If we are able to … protect and lure [the radiation] in order that it simply turns into an imperceptible quantity of warmth, hopefully it’d have the ability to 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 may very well be no extra harmful than on a regular basis environmental exposures, he mentioned.
Endiatx ventures into uncharted endoscopy territory
For now although, Smith’s ambition is targeted on a less complicated but nonetheless significant purpose: rethinking customary higher endoscopy.
“Proper now, for an higher endoscopy: you’ve abdomen ache, perhaps you go to the ER, then major care, then GI, then perhaps medicine 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 may very well be achieved in a couple of minutes.”
Against this, Smith mentioned 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 gadget isn’t easy. Smith mentioned the present technology 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 reside onstage at RoboBusiness in Santa Clara, Calif. Attendees had the chance to look at reside video from Smith’s abdomen as he mentioned the system.
The day after Thanksgiving, he would swallow three extra in a single session beneath the steerage of Vivek Kumbhari, M.D., Ph.D., a outstanding 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 information’
As 2024 attracts to an in depth, Endiatx has ongoing medical trials for PillBot 1.0 in New Zealand. In the meantime, improvement of PillBot 2.0—what Smith calls its “racehorse” mannequin—is accelerating, targeted on dramatic dimension discount by means of new battery expertise and smaller motors. The purpose is to realize impartial buoyancy, in contrast to 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 gadget expertise. The sphere dates again to the primary radio-frequency capsule in 1957, which transmitted primary physiological information.
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 in the end built-in these property after merging with Covidien in 2015.
This lineage validated capsule endoscopy for visualizing the small gut and diagnosing circumstances like gastrointestinal bleeding and inflammatory bowel illness. Endiatx is coming into a market section that features established gamers akin to Medtronic’s PillCam and newer magnetically actuated programs like Navicam.
| State of affairs/Facility Sort | Common Price | Worth Vary | Supply |
|---|---|---|---|
| Common 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 Follow |
| California (outpatient) | $1,850 | $1,286 – $2,850 | Sidecar Well being |
| With Insurance coverage (affected person share) | Will depend on plan | Deductibles & co-insurance | GI Endoscopy Follow |
Endiatx operations evolve
To realize its targets, Endiatx has invested closely in in-house capabilities. The corporate’s crew 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 have been mainly figuring out of homes,” Smith remembers of the early days. Immediately, Endiatx’s more and more refined facility displays the corporate’s development from advert hoc prototyping to real manufacturing readiness. Controlling manufacturing processes can be important 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 response to 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 area, proved a turning level.
A reside 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 reside demonstration that led to elevated investor engagement.
Smith mentioned an in depth affiliate’s afamily member had died from abdomen most cancers after avoiding standard endoscopy. “There’s no actual loser right here [with PillBot] besides abdomen most cancers,” Smith mentioned.
The corporate’s extra futuristic-sounding ideas, from nuclear-powered surgical robots to bio-inspired interventional units, may appear distant, however they align with a lot of Silicon Valley’s challenges of the established order. If the corporate succeeds in sooner or later making robots the scale of a grain of rice, it’s unlikely to cease there.
“Sometime, there can be nanobots,” Smith asserted. “It’s inevitable — it’s only a query of when and who’s going to do it.”
Lately, enterprise capital has cooled on Silicon Valley, whereas cities like Austin, Miami, and Seattle lure startups. However the area continues to be a pressure 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 indicate the world that magic nonetheless exists in Silicon Valley,” mentioned Smith.
One other Hollywood film to discover the idea of robots traversing the physique is Incredible Voyage, a 1966 flick. | Supply: James Vaughan through Flickr (beneath Artistic Commons license)
Editor’s observe: This text was syndicated from The Robotic Report sibling publication R&D World.
