“Designing A More Universal & Cost-Effective Surgical Robotic” with Gianluca De Novi of XSurgical

Jeffrey (1s):
Welcome back to Radio Entrepreneurs. Again, my name is Jeffrey Davis. I’m the host of Radio Entrepreneurs, and we have been streaming our stories and in studio, out of studio streaming, it all depends on what’s gone on in the economy for over seven years or have a million people connected to us. We hope you’ve connected to us on Radio Entrepreneurs because our stories are always relevant to what’s going on in entrepreneurship. And we have a reoccurring guests that my partner for Mage, interviewed Jonathan Freedman – Gianluca, CEO of XSurgical welcome back Gian.

Gianluca (34s):
Oh my pleasure.

Jeffrey (36s):
Tell us about a XSurgical and what’s going on.

Gianluca (40s):
Well, trying to get started back after the COVID, which has been a scrambling all our plans, you know, we were just discussing about how plans change. Suddenly we left the actual, your public plus time saying that we were starting the series a fundraise, and, and then COVID came like a few weeks later, like three, four weeks later. And so we suspended everything and now we are back. We, we have a investment banker following us, and we are starting about to start a crowdfunding campaign would start engine that’s pretty much what is happening from the fundraise point of view from the development point of view.

Gianluca (1m 27s):
At that time, when we had our last meeting, we didn’t have a, a working prototype that we were working on it. And now we finally have, and back in December, we even had a work first demonstration of a total knee replacement procedure executed with our robot and with a surgeon that was operating remotely from Milan.

Jeffrey (1m 53s):
Wow. So again, how would this product be used?

Gianluca (2m 2s):
Well, the idea is to try to answer to a very important flow of surgical robotics. So, which is that surgical robotics is to the non-cost effective, which means that all the existing products on the market, that they are focused on a very few type of procedures. And that these are very important, important characteristic, because if you don’t have enough patients to undergo that very specific type of procedures, you can not afford the robot. So for big hospitals that have big volumes of, you know, different types of procedures, it it’s feasible, but in a medium, small size hospitals, which are pretty much 10 times more is not possibility because you will have the robot six sitting in your breathing room, doing nothing most of the time.

Gianluca (2m 49s):
So we decided to try to answer to these, to these kind of open a problem, how many show of the surgical robotics designing a surgical robot that is more designed as a platform for developing more and more types of procedures? Just matter of fact, more like a, a universal surgical robot. So there are, as you can see in the ground, in my background, there are four manipulators and there is a very fancy bed that can move and can again, somehow position the patient in different, in different ways. And so the idea is that if you can have more type of procedures, you can most likely have more patients.

Gianluca (3m 35s):
So the first answer to that tissue is, is to make like universal design. The second way to do that is to create a system that is not closed, like all the other products, which means that who is a developing robot, owns everything. And no one can touch a screw on the robot. Our system is instead an open platform, which means that we seek collaboration with third parties that can implement their own procedures for our platform, so that we can try to crowdsource the number of procedures and increase the number of procedure fast as possible. And on the market, there are a lot of smart companies in, in the, in the medical field that are built around one single patent and they are the best in class for that specific procedure.

Gianluca (4m 24s):
So the entire company is built around one type of procedure and they cannot transition to surgical robotics because otherwise they will have to build a robot that does only one type of procedure. And that is a, that they have. So we offered them an opportunity. They have a platform and we offer them a development kit for our, for our system, so that they can implement their own procedure on our system. So we adapt to the surgical instruments and the protocol for our system and make it even possible remotely. Our system is, is a, ByDesign a remotely operated robot, which also includes the possibility to add a tutor or a second a surgeon that can take over a certain point during the procedure.

Gianluca (5m 6s):
So we offered that opportunity. And the third way we, we decided to address the issue of being cost effective is to create a system that is a more flexible and optimized for mobile settings, such as a container of writing rooms or track trailers or breathing room, because that can even bring the surgical robot to even smaller hospitals. Because today there is a new model that is coming, that is growing, which is the shareable operating rooms. So there are truck trailers, which are all furnished with the best equipment. And they are shared between multiple small hospitals in certain districts.

Gianluca (5m 48s):
And they can essentially rent per use as model of breathing room with a surgical robot. So our system is designed to work in this kind of environments that doesn’t require an entire operating room built around the robot, but does very flexible requirements in terms of our consumption and connectivity. And that makes the system also very suitable for a wards, Chanel Oreos, or disaster recovery. There is like an earthquake something. Then there is possibility to deploy this kind of units with a surgical robot. You can have mostly paramedics in the, in the area, and then you can have most of the surgeons in their own hospitals, performing the procedures for Milton and being able to perform not only laparoscopy like the DaVinci, he he’s a system that can perform also open surgery in occupated surgery.

Gianluca (6m 47s):
So you can essentially use these for response trauma, trauma response. So you can use these, for example, for plastic surgery site, if you have like an injury on face or on the hands feet, nerves, genitals all very dedicated area of our body in the outside. So that makes the system very interesting for those environments as well.

Jeffrey (7m 10s):
Well, you know, I’m just wondering if this is a big challenge, you know, you say that there’s small businesses, but are you, are you competing with some very large multinational corporations to try to get into this field?

Gianluca (7m 22s):
To be honest, only partially? Well, the only existing real product in the field is a, is intuitive with, with their, their dangerous robot. The only for the laparoscopy. But like I said, we overlap only partially because yeah, we do the laparoscopy, but it’s only one of the things we do. And for the orthopedics, we overlapped with other products, which are mostly smaller companies. And for me open surgery, we do, there’s nothing actually out there. So we create a bigger market and with more consumer and a blast. So we expand further than market because having an open architecture system on top of the classical revenue models, which is the sale of the robot, the service maintenance, so the disposable parts, et cetera, et cetera.

Gianluca (8m 7s):
We also have royalties from the sales of the third parties that, that want to sell for our platform. So it’s yeah. Sliding competition. So, but not heavily like everybody else everybody’s competing for the same slice of that cake. We are trying to look at the, you know, a much bigger slice.

Jeffrey (8m 29s):
So how are you selling the product now? Are you selling director your own Salesforce?

Gianluca (8m 35s):
We have not selling. We, we are now at the end of the development of our prototype of the third generation of the robot. And we are seeking funds now to, to convert our prototype in the final design of the system. So we expect to be on the market within I think, 18 months for the military market, where there are no requirements for FDA approval and pretty much three years for the civilian market, because we will have to undergo the

Jeffrey (9m 16s):
Interesting, and we’re speaking with Gianluca XSurgical CEO also as a result of a referral to us at Radio Entrepreneurs, from Jimmy feral at PR first Gianluca. If somebody wants to get hold of you, learn a little bit more about the company, how would they find you?

Gianluca (9m 37s):
Well, they can, the first thing they can do is to just reach our website and she’s a XSurgical robotics.com. And pretty soon they will be, they will really be available everywhere on the social, the advertising of start engine for our crowd funding campaign. Plus they can Google and there are not a lot of videos and articles we’ve been followed by the media pretty closely. So that’d be a good to be able to, to find a lot of info and through the website, get in touch with us.

Jeffrey (10m 10s):
I want to thank you for being on Radio Entrepreneurs a second time. We hope you come back again. It’s very exciting technology. You know, I, during a previous surgical procedures for myself, I had to look into robotics. I know they’ve come a long way and thank you to people like you for that. So remind everybody, this is Radio Entrepreneurs.