If you want to learn how to build a robot that works inside the human body, the stomach is a good place to learn it. The stomach sits at the end of the most direct path into the body, the one a capsule is designed to take. It is a roomy, fluid-filled space, which gives a small machine something to move through. The stomach’s shape and anatomy are well understood. Within those walls we can teach a robot to see, hold a position, move purposefully, and work out where it is. These are the foundations of everything we hope to build later, and the stomach lets us work on them one at a time instead of all at once.
The stomach matters more than most people realize
The stomach is where a lot of consequential things can happen. Ulcers. Bleeding. Chronic inflammation. Gastric cancer, which remains one of the leading causes of cancer death in the world. For all of these, physicians rely on being able to look directly at the tissue.
That look comes via an upper endoscopy. In the United States alone, physicians performed an estimated 7.5 million of them in 2019, each one depending on trained specialists and dedicated facilities. That infrastructure requires people, equipment, space, time, and financial resources . In many parts of the world, it is far harder to come by.
While our products are not approved yet by any regulatory body, we hope that they will in the future help to address that gap. There is a great deal we still have to learn and prove. But the gap is real, and it is part of why we chose to start here.
The stomach is a good place to teach a robot
What that teaching looks like, in practice, is a sequence. A robot has to see before it can move, and it has to move before anything harder becomes possible. The stomach lets us take those steps in order.
Seeing first
The first thing any robot inside the body needs is a way to see. That is why PillVue™ is where we begin. It is being developed as a swallowable capsule for real-time, high-quality upper gastrointestinal visualization, and within our platform it plays the role of the foundation. It is the imaging system that our next generation products will build upon.
Then moving
PillBot™ is being developed to take the next step, combining real-time, high-quality video with physician-controlled movement inside the stomach.
That difference sounds small, but it isn’t. A camera that is weighted, like PillVue, is a different instrument from one that actively goes where it’s asked to go. PillBot is a capsule with a camera that could be told to look there, go back, hold still, etc. Developing that at a scale small enough to swallow is one of the steps toward what robotic medicine could become.
Just beginning
We think of our technologies as generations of a single platform rather than a set of separate devices. Each one is meant to teach us something the next one needs to know. Visualization teaches us about imaging at this scale. Navigation teaches us about movement, power and control. What we learn from both should carry forward into capabilities we’re still only sketching today.
Starting with the stomach keeps that sequence honest. It gives us one environment, one set of engineering problems, and one place to earn the right to go further.
Small on purpose
Some people assume that because our devices are small, our ambitions must be too. They aren’t. A robot small enough to swallow changes who can be looked at, and where. An exam that doesn’t require a procedure suite, sedation, or a specialist within driving distance is a different kind of medicine from the one we have now.
That is a long way off, and it starts with one organ. The stomach is the first step, and everything else in this series is built on it.
Arman Nadershahi
CEO
Endiatx
