Skip to main content
Uncategorized

Rob Surgical, a spin-off from IBEC and UPC, closes a €5 million investment round

By 27 de September de 2019No Comments
< Back to news
Photo: IBEC
 27.09.2019

Rob Surgical, a spin-off from IBEC and UPC, closes a €5 million investment round

Rob Surgical, a spin-off created by the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC), based in the PCB, and the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC) in 2012, has closed a €5 million investment round with the Dutch holding Scranton Enterprises to fund the final phase of the new Bitrack System –an alternative to the current laparoscopy surgical robot Da Vinci– and launch the product onto the market.

 

Rob Surgical is a company which designs and develops new robotic systems for minimally invasive surgery. The investment will facilitate the obtention of the CE marking for the new Bitrack System, which will enable it’s break into the market to improve the effectiveness of current surgical robotics.

The Bitrack System will be an alternative to the current laparoscopy surgical robot Da Vinci and will be an improvement on what is currently available in terms of efficiency.

“Our value proposition that differentiates us from other surgical robots is based on three cornerstones: high precision benefiting the patient, superior usability for the surgeon and a significant total cost of ownership reduction benefiting hospitals”, explains Amat, CEO of Rob Surgical and president of CataloniaBio & HealthTech, based in the Barcelona Science Park.

To achieve this, the Rob Surgical engineers, led by the professors Josep Amat and Alícia Casals, IBEC associated researcher, have designed a flexible, modular and open robotic platform that “will improve the effectiveness of today’s robotic surgery and make it accessible to more hospitals around the world”, adds Jaume Amat. “We will make possible combined manual and robotic surgery, what we like to call Hybrid Mininum Invasive Surgery (HMIS)” says Amat.

The new robot has already been technically validated in experimental models, used by surgeons from the Mayo Clinic (United States) and the Barcelona university hospitals Clinic, Vall d’Hebron and Germans Trias. Between 2019 and 2021 Rob Surgical will build three new units to finalise the validation and industrialisation process to expand the corporate and engineering team and will conduct the final safety and functionality trials.