SAN FRANCISCO – No one yet has figured out how to shrink doctors so they can make house calls inside the human blood stream as they did in the science fiction movie “Fantastic Voyage.” But the founders of a gastroenterology startup think they have the next best thing – a remote-controlled robot so small it can be swallowed like a pill.
The concept captured the imagination of a panel of judges earlier this month at the 2023 American Gastroenterological Association Tech Summit where it was named the winner of the annual Shark Tank innovation competition. The AGA Tech Summit and Shark Tank are the flagship events of the AGA Center for GI Innovation and Technology.
“This could be a game-changing investment down the line,” one of the judges, Amrita Sethi, MD, from Columbia University Medical Center in New York, said in an interview.
COURTESY AMERICAN GASTROENTEROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION
Hawyard, Calif.–based Endiatx is early in its voyage. , but CEO Torrey Smith, an aerospace engineer, sees future generations of the device operating on any diseased tissues that can be treated with surgery. “We believe teeny robots can go anywhere in the body,” he said.
The company executives envision that one day, robots small enough to enter the human brain will be able to eat away at tumors. “Imagine having your brain surgery while you’re on a ride at Disneyland,” said Endiatx cofounder and chair Alex Luebke. If that sounds fanciful, Mr. Smith cites a case report of a botfly larva that wormed its way into a human skull and ate a golf-ball sized chunk of brain.
Endiatx has raised $3 million and sent 24 of its robots swimming into the stomachs of its founding team. Mr. Smith himself has swallowed 15. Operators can use an external device with a joystick. Engineers have experimented with an Xbox video game controller to navigate around the stomach. The procedure requires no anesthesia.
The company expects to apply for Food and Drug Administration approval in 2025 or 2026. Mr. Smith is hoping the agency will approve it quickly because the robot pills are similar enough to passive camera pills that have been on the market for years.
But he also sees it as a crucial step forward because controlling the robot with three electric motors squirting water in six directions will allow physicians to point it at what they really need to see, not just hope to get a lucky shot of a problem area as the device floats by.
The most immediate technical challenge is improving the quality of the pill’s video. “We’re evaluating different cameras but we know we can’t be inferior on the imaging side,” Mr. Smith said.
Attention from the AGA is crucial because the team of engineers wants physicians to help it improve the robot pill, Mr. Luebeke said. “We can build anything, but we need guidance about what the market needs. Doctors have to say, ‘We need you to tweak it this way or that way.’ ”
The business opportunity is large, Mr. Smith said, with 7.5 million upper endoscopies out of 223 million endoscopic procedures done per year in the United States.
Endiatx figures the gross margin on procedures with the robot pills is 90%-95% because the manufacturing cost is about $50 per pill, but physicians can bill $500 for them using existing CPT codes for passive pill cameras.
Dr. Sethi said the robot pill stood out among other contenders because of the dire need for improved endoscopy technology.
Endiatx will represent AGA at the 2023 Digestive Disease Week® (DDW) Shark Tank pitch competition.