Big telesurgery advances are coming soon, Sovato CEO Cynthia Perazzo says

Sovato co-founder and CEO Cynthia Perazzo offers a forecast of telesurgery tech and her perspective on the biggest opportunities.

Sovato Health co-founder and CEO Cynthia Perazzo expects big advances in telesurgery in the year ahead.

“Remote surgeries and procedures are inevitable,” she said in a Medical Design & Outsourcing interview. “We’ll see over the next 12 months more robots becoming remote-enabled and making big announcements about that. We’ll see more studies and surgeons and robotics partners creating studies to bring the evidence that shows that remote surgery is safe and the outcomes are very good.”

Perazzo should know. Sovato Health has been working with leading surgical robotics developers and the physicians and health care systems that use them to usher in the future of remote, minimally invasive procedures. Her company recently closed a $26 million Series B funding round that included a first-time investment from Intuitive Surgical.

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“I’m very excited about the collaborative nature and the competitive nature of the medical device world and the very collaborative nature of health systems and surgeons who really just want best outcomes for patients,” she said. ” … We’re highly motivated.”

In the following interview — which has been edited for length and clarity — we discussed Perazzo’s perspective on the future of telesurgery and Sovato’s unique role in making it happen.

We’ll have more from our interview with Perazzo soon, including advice for device developers who want to make the most of the telesurgery opportunity. Sign up for our free email newsletter to be among the first to read the next article.

MDO: Who does Sovato work with?

Perazzo: “We work with robotic device manufacturers who are bringing surgical and procedural robots to market to enable them to work at distance to enable telesurgery. We’ve spent a lot of time in this early phase of telesurgery getting those partners ready for market for telesurgery. And then our customers are hospitals and health systems and surgeons who are bringing the care to the market, the actual providers. We believe these providers, with the amazing innovation in robotics, will be bringing multiple robots into their systems over the next few years that they’ll want to use, and we bring them to market together.”

Can you offer an example of how you’re working with device developers?

Perazzo: “In June we published some technical guidelines that our technical team co-authored with cybersecurity experts from Medcrypt, device experts from Medtronic, J&J, intuitive and Virtual Incision, and with some input from clinical leaders like Dr. Yuman Fong from City of Hope. Those were published as an industry collective coming together to determine what it takes to make safe and scalable remote procedures or telesurgery. We’ve been cultivating partnerships in the market because our place is between the device and the health system to connect them through our products and services.”

Related: Sovato and device OEMs develop new technical guidelines to advance remote robotic surgery

And how have you been working with those healthcare providers?

Perazzo: “In the last two years, we’ve been working with key opinion leaders and surgeons who help us think about what it’s going to take to support that surgeon and their care team in the room to do this as the way they do business. What are those tools they need? We’ve been working with them in our product development phases, and now as we progress toward commercial, we’re working with a handful of robotics companies to move through the regulatory approval process that the robots need to be used for telesurgery. We are getting through that process, and then we’ll be actively selling the hospitals and health systems targeting IDNs (integrated delivery networks) that have the need to unlock some of their resources that are currently geographically bound like surgeons and ORs. You often have your specialty surgeons at your flagship hospital in your IDN, and patients either come into the flagship or that surgeon has to travel to a community hospital. Now we can relieve the geographic boundaries and optimize the utilization of the ORs in the system as well as the specialists and the surgeons and the interventionists in the system.”

Are you seeking the regulatory approval on your own or supporting the device developers?

Perazzo: “The robotic company will need to do a 510(k) with our support. We’re supporting them by providing all of the specifications and the data related to our platform that’s being used to transmit the signals and the video and the other data across our network. In the United States, it is a process where the robot company will submit and earn the 510(k), but outside of the U.S. it varies by geography.”

For a system like Medtronic’s Hugo or Johnson & Johnson MedTech’s Ottava, are they going to come out of the gate in the U.S. with telesurgery included in their first approval?

Perazzo: “We are seeing many of the robotics companies design their robots to be telesurgery-native. That’s a phrase we’re hearing. For instance, the LivsMed robot out of South Korea is in the approval process in South Korea and has not been approved yet, but it is telesurgery-native. Many of the Chinese robots have already done telesurgery and have been selling their devices with the telesurgery capability already enabled. So I think we’re going to see that in this next generation of devices. They’ll all be telesurgery-enabled, right from the beginning.”

Where do you see the biggest opportunities for telesurgery?

Perazzo: ” We have so many emerging robots. The soft-tissue robots have the most traction today in the market, in addition to some of the orthopedic robots. The soft-tissue robots are setting the pace with telesurgery. So you see coming out of China, South Korea, Japan, a lot of robot companies do some amazing demonstrations showing that telesurgery is entirely feasible. We’re very excited, as are many others, about some of the neurovascular robots that are coming into the market. There are many of them and they’re fantastic. We think that use case is going to be so game-changing for the treatment of stroke, for instance. Remote mechanical thrombectomies will really open up standard of care for patients who don’t have it available today. We’re very excited about that, but we’re also seeing some really cool things that could happen in high-volume diagnostic spaces like think tele-cystoscopy. Could we relieve some of the backlog in the urologist’s office by changing the delivery model through remote diagnostics? And a lot of the cool endoluminal robots that are coming on board have a little lower risk profile than holding sharp knives and moving them around in the anatomy. We think those also are going to change the availability of minimally invasive procedures, and that getting them deployed broadly will happen more quickly with telementoring, telecollaboration and remote surgery.”

More at MassDevice: Download our free Surgical Robotics Special Report for a deep dive into the surgical robotics market