Esta pastilla-robot busca ponerle fin a las endoscopías tradicionales: tiene una cámara y recorre el cuerpo por su cuenta. Se llama PillBot y su creador, Torrey Smith, la ha ingerido hasta en 43 ocasiones. La empresa iniciará sus ensayos clínicos y podría estar a la venta en el 2026.
HAYWARD, Calif., July 2, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Endiatx, a pioneering Silicon Valley medical technology company, is shaping the future of medicine with groundbreaking micro-robotics inside the human body. The company’s flagship innovation, PillBot™, is designed to wirelessly navigate the human stomach, lowering costs and increasing access to diagnosis and treatments.
Would you swallow a micro-robot? To many, it seems like something straight out of science fiction. However, at the TED and Amazon MARS conferences, Endiatx Co-Founder Dr. Vivek Kumbhari, live on stage, navigated PillBot™ through the stomach of Endiatx Chairman Alex Luebke. Kumbhari, who chairs Gastroenterology at the Mayo Clinic, described how PillBot™’s simple means of investigating the stomach will greatly improve medical care.
The PillBot™ micro-robot, about the size of a vitamin pill, transmits live video as it motors throughout the water-filled stomach. After skipping a meal, a patient drinks water and swallows PillBot™. The physician operator – who can be remote, with the patient at home – then maneuvers the capsule via a controller and internet connection to scan the whole stomach.
See PillBot™ showcased in an engaging TED talk and video by Adam Savage (of Mythbusters, The Matrix, and Star Wars fame).
PillBot™ will complete its clinical trials later in 2024, and Endiatx expects the device to gain FDA clearance in 2025. PillBot™ should launch commercially in the US in early 2026 and from there expand internationally – especially to developing nations that lack access to medical facilities.
Since four out of five upper endoscopies do not detect anything, PillBot™ will save many patients the discomfort of sedation and a hospital visit, plus provide payers with a much more economical cost. At the same time, PillBot™ will steer limited hospital infrastructure and resources toward the fraction of cases where an initial PillBot™ screening has deemed a full upper endoscopy necessary.
With future AI-enabled movement, automation, and diagnostics, PillBot will become even more efficient, enabling systematic screening plus acute care. Diagnostic procedures performed by PillBot™ and its AI-powered successors will identify diseases such as stomach cancer – which claims some 800,000 lives globally each year – early enough to intervene and save lives.
Endiatx, a team of 20, has raised $7 million since its 2019 founding.
For media inquiries, see the Press Page of the Endiatx website. Join Endiatx on the journey to bring micro-robotics inside the human body.
Fuente: https://www.prnewswire.com
