Name: Brainstorm AI Singapore 2024: Swallow This! The Transformative Power Of AI-Enabled Micro-Robotics In the Human Body
Uploaded: 2024-07-30
Duration: 15 min 10 s
Description: Torrey SMITH, Co-founder and CEO, Endiatx Moderator: Ellie AUSTIN, FORTUNE

Torrey SMITH, Co-founder and CEO, Endiatx Moderator: Ellie AUSTIN, FORTUNE

Brainstorm AI Singapore 2024: Swallow This! The Transformative Power Of AI-Enabled Micro-Robotics In the Human Body

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Brainstorm AI 2024: The Transformative Power Of AI-Enabled Micro-Robotics In the Human Body

So as I said, we're talking about micro robots here that are ingested into the body that in itself poses a lot of questions. It sounds a bit like a science fiction film, which is both a source of fascination. But also I think for many people probably in here a source of skepticism. So if we could start off by you explaining to me briefly why you think pill bot is more effective than the traditional endoscopy? Well, thank you. Our hope is that with little tiny robots that can swim around in the body, you can actually supplant or augment the existing tech that's out there. I'd, I'd like to think that pill bot could be a little scout to go out and find illness out in the world and then bring that illness into a hospital to treat properly. Ok. Ok. So it's, it's speeding up the process that it's making it more efficient. Um Looking at your website, the pil bot team, it's made up of a lot of engineers. Now, some people might expect there to be doctors, scientists on your core team. Can you explain to me why that isn't the case and where the medical expertise comes from in this process. Well, so besides a group of almost 20 deep tech engineers, we actually have leading gastroenterologists from all over the planet that have joined the company and many of them have even stepped up and invested and put their, put their names on the line. And are they part of the team or are they an advisory panel? What's the structure? Well, we're very proud to count Vivek Kumari, a leading gastroenterologist as one of our co founders and a very close friend. OK. OK. So some people here in the room are going, I would imagine the draw comparisons to something like Elizabeth Holmes and the an of scandal in that this is an outlandish idea that promises to transform the healthcare industry. Some might say it's too good to be true and we're going to see the technology demonstrated in a minute. I mentioned that you're in the process of seeking FDA approval. How else are you going to legitimized pillow within the scientific and the medical community to silence those skeptics? Well, the key here is just uh putting a robot where our mouth is, right? If we can create a technology that lets a doctor have a look around inside you to the point where it's maybe a little bit more inexpensive or a little bit more accessible. And if doctors start to say we'd like to use this in our actual patients, then we're starting to do our job. But until we get to the point where doctors are demanding to use pill bot, you know, it really is just a R and D project, but we're excited to show it off right here. So you can kind of start to judge for yourself. So it's word of mouth. Obviously, that's the FDA component is that also going to be peer reviewed research. How does that side of things work? Actually, that's been one of the things that's helping us most of all uh attract brilliant doctors is uh to be honest, uh everyone wants to publish on til bot. It's an exciting new platform that can open up all all sorts of new research avenues. And so people are actually realizing that uh you know, joining the team and, and getting a hold of the robots could actually help them in their, their academic career as well. And are people publishing? I know PBO? Yeah, it hasn't featured hugely in the mainstream press. But if we're looking at the scholarly academic side of things, kind of what level of publication has that been so far around Pil Bot, the biggest publication so far that's coming is that we have officially done our first patients uh in Auckland, New Zealand uh in our IRB uh clinical trials. And we're actually starting to see Pil bot do some clinical work, but of course, that's just uh under, under under active progress right now, trial gets complete, will basically bring all that data together and we can think about publishing. Ok. So nascent, but you're looking to have more data in the future. For sure. My final question before this part of the session is so pilot or your, your company has raised $7.5 million I believe in funding since it was founded in 2019. And it's worth noting that 1.5 million of that dollars, um 1.5 million of those dollars comes from the Singapore based Virge Tech Health Fund. Um 7.5 million. It's a good amount. It's not a huge amount. And I imagine that this is deeply expensive technology to develop. So where's the rest of the money going to come from? Well, we're obviously excited to continue that adventure. You can always do things with new amounts of funding. But the thing that we're really proud of is with the support of Verge Health tech funds here in Singapore and the support of some of the most passionate deep tech engineers in Silicon Valley. And, and actually beyond, we've been able to make some magic happen using pretty limited resources. But when we show you the robot today, you'll see that it's not perfect that you'll definitely see opportunities for it to improve. And that's kind of where the next rounds of funding might be able to help us. Ok. So you're going to continue pitching right on that note, I know you've got a couple of slides to show us to uh to explain in a bit more depth how the robot works. So take it away. Yeah. So let's just briefly look at a robot and we'll start to ask ourselves, you know, if we go back in time, you know, the way that you would get data uh from someone's health inside the human body, um was very difficult, you could cut into the body, you could slide a tube into the body. But in a hospital and we're asking ourselves, could we potentially have microscopic robots travel throughout your body? Not only finding out what's wrong, but maybe actually starting to fix it. So that's the adventure we'd like to go on today and we'll have to acknowledge that it's a difficult challenge. But where we're going to begin is the human stomach. Because in the human stomach, we have this unique opportunity for a robot that is maybe not microscopic. This is the size of your fingertip. But pill bot contains a live video, three dimensional motion with pump jets. If you're willing to drink some water, you can get some motion um and the ability to control it in XY and Z. And so the goal here is to basically show there's a part of the body that we can actually send a robot to right now. The stomach, we can probably do an amazing block of work there. Then where do we go next? And so you'll see right here is kind of where we are in the current process of miniaturization. I want these to be rice brain size. I want to do brain surgery with it. Um So looking inside till bot, you'll see a pretty elegant combination of pump jet motors, really high powered lithium batteries that we work really carefully to make safe live video, right? A lot of the stuff you would see in a drone. But the reason that we're doing these robots is that they give us the data, right? Data is how we understand what's wrong data is how we train up A I. And from here, there's a bright future for this. But you know, let's start to talk about what we can actually do with uh one of these. So OK, this, this is pill bot and I need to turn this thing on and if I'm gonna turn this thing on, I'm gonna need my chief engineer Quentin to come out here, Quentin. Let's bring this thing to life. OK. So, and Tori and Quentin, I need you to talk us through what you're doing here at. So Quinton is using an optical signal, a bright light to wake til bot up, it's been sleeping. And so now you'll see til bot um start to uh swim around. He just got some water into the thruster lumen. So we don't get vapor locked. And what we have here is basically a swimming little drone. And can I just highlight how Quentin is controlling it. He's using what looks like an Xbox controller. Yeah, we, we find that a lot of younger gastroenterologists really understand the value proposition. Um, but basically what we're doing here is we're saying, let's make a swimming robot. Let's call it a little eyeball. Let's drink some water. Let's swallow the robot. And let's take a procedure that would be done in a hospital after several physical hospital visits. Let's take that whole adventure and let's digitize it. Let's turn it into a telemedicine, call it home. Let's let a I do some of the boring work for us. So this is about accessibility. How much does a pill boat cost? So cost of goods uh can often hover around 35 to 50 bucks, right? It's a relatively inexpensive physical article. All of the value is in the hard work that miniaturized it and in the data that comes off of the robot. But if we can't make it inexpensive to build, then there's no way we're going to get it out into the world and actually go find problems. What do you expect it to cost when it comes to market? Um In the US market, it'll be a couple of $100 just like a normal pill camera. But if we're going to take it to Asia and beyond, um honestly, I envision a future where these would cost maybe 10 or $15 or maybe even less, but you'd have hundreds of millions of people accessing this kind of care. But the amazing thing is that while we're doing that, the health data that would come off a platform like that would be incredibly valuable. OK? Um So Tori, I believe you are not going to swallow pill bot. I, you know, honestly, we came all this way. I think we might as well might as well go ahead and swallow. It would be rude not to. Ok. So you're, you're gulping down a glass of water to prepare your stomach. I imagine I need a little fish tank in my tongue. You need a fish tank in your stomach. Ok? And for context, Tori told me earlier, this is the 45th pill box that he has swallowed in his lifetime to date. It's, it's a lot of fun. We really enjoy this process. Ok? Perfect. And for those who can't see, I was like, oh wow. More. Ok. I would say the pill bot looks like the size of a pretty large multivitamin. Um It's, it's not small, it's not a small robot. In fact, it's probably just about the biggest thing that someone could ever reasonably swallow. And even maybe half of people might not be able to do it. But the thing that bugs me is that we transact as much as $55 billion every year in the old way of how we do endoscopies. But that only reaches 1% of stomachs and So we're, we're really not reaching people where we need to reach them. And what do you think? Should we uh go ahead, we get you guys. OK. All right. So Quinton is gonna hand me this guy and uh let's uh let's do it. I'll get it nice and wet and uh hopefully let's get a live video up on the screen. Here we see. Oh, here we go. There we go. OK. So you can see. Oh, and I need the uh antenna a little bit closer to my tummy. There we go. So hopefully you can see me. You can all see yourselves. And now let's go ahead and swallow pills out. All right. So let's have a look at my stomach. I've been starving all day. Ok? I can whip it around a little bit and then the hope is that we'll sort of break into the bottom of the stomach and you'll kind of see what's going on. There we go. So, the idea here is we want to make sure that you can quickly and easily give a gastroenterologist a live view inside the stomach and the ability to move around. I want this to be like the tip of an endoscope, but just in virtual form. Ok. Um Here we go, we're traveling through your intestine. Um Tori if how are you feeling, first of all? So sometimes I'll feel it when I swallow it. But honestly, once, once I swallow it, that's OK. I think we're gonna cut the video now because that's enough intestines for one day. But Tory, I, I've just got a few questions like quick fire questions that I want to ask you as, as we come to a close. Um, is there anyone who can't take pillow? I'm thinking pregnant women, Children. Well, right now, the, the weird thing is if you're like a child or a cancer patient, you'll have a really delicate G I tract and inserting an endoscope is actually kind of traumatic. And so if we can make it maybe a little smaller, so it would be appropriate for a kid. You might actually be opening up treatment avenues for people that are actually kind of prohibited from them. Ok. And you said that you mentioned this, all that some people call it. The what happens that? Well, we have been swallowing camera pills that don't move but still contain many of the components. We just saw, uh for more than 25 years. And during that time, we've learned how to do it safely and we've also learned that maybe one in five, maybe one in 10 people are going to have trouble swallowing a camera pill. So for us, even if we make it the same exact size and shape, we're going to be missing out on maybe 10, maybe 20% of the population. The thing is though those camera pills because they don't move, they only address about 1% of the population, you can't use them on everyone. And so we're actually talking about going from addressing 1% of people to maybe 80 or 90% of people by making it a virtual experience. And worst case scenario, pill goes rogue within, you know, what, what are the potential health dangers as a result of that happening? Because as incredible as it sounds, we're putting a small drone into the human body and that must come with risks. Well, we had a, we had a pretty amazing uh chat with FDA back in December and they sat us down and the thing that was really thrilling was to hear enthusiasm coming from the biomedical engineers over at FDA, from the regulatory bodies, from the doctors working with them. And they said honestly, this is tech that everyone is kind of hoping for and we want to sit down with your team and figure out how do we do it safely? How do we do it? Right. And what were they concerned about the FDA when you spoke to them? We were concerned about the fact that we use lithium batteries and we were curious if the FDA would be willing to even entertain the conversation. And they actually said, absolutely, sit down. Let's go over your engineering plans. Let's see how you test these batteries. Let's see what happens when a battery fails. Can you contain it? And so far it looks like we're actually on track to being able to turn this into a safe platform. Ok. There's so many more questions I have Pretoria, I'm sure you have Pretoria as well. But thankfully, he will be sticking around for the next two days. So please do feel free to find some at a coffee break, flag him down and continue the conversation because this, as I said is quite an outlandish idea. Thank you for demonstrating it to us today and I look forward to seeing what happens next and thank you so much. Thank you.