Will Smart Touch products become the next Leonardo Da Vinci surgical robot?
Smart Touch (Chinese: 睿触科技) completed a Series A+ round of financing worth USD tens of thousands of million, with Walden International (Chinese: 华登国际) as the exclusive investor.
The fund will be used for NMPA (National Medical Products Administration) registration, market development and brand building of its surgical robot products, and continuous research and development of multi-pipeline products.
Founded in 2019, Smart Touch is a surgical robot company integrating R&D, production and sale. At the beginning of its establishment, the company focused on cancer surgery and treatment and provided hospitals with more precise, fast and safe early cancer screening percutaneous puncture surgery robots.
The tumor puncture robot launched the clinical trial in Shanghai and Anhui hospitals. The company not only improves the accuracy of puncture biopsy, but also increases the detection rate of diverse, complex and smaller clusters of tumor tissues, and provides more treatment methods for subsequent ablation therapy. At the same time, Smart Touch has developed products such as vascular interventional surgery robots and robots in laparoscopic surgery. And the related products have successively started clinical trials on animals.
The percutaneous puncture surgery robots are designed to use MRI, ultrasound, CT and other imaging technologies to locate a target area and guide the needle to reach there. Its application is mainly for collecting tissue samples for diagnostic purposes. Compared with traditional biopsy procedures that rely on the manual puncture, the robotic manipulator is more stable and can provide higher stiffness and accuracy.
At present, the percutaneous puncture surgery robots mainly include the Mona Lisa of Biobot, the Automated Needle Targeting system of NDR, the XACT Robotics® of ISYS and products of Perfint Healthcare.