Glioblastoma, micro robots to the rescue

On Episode 10 of The Surgibots Podcast I was joined by the CEO of Robeauté, Bertrand Duplat, to discuss how micro robotics are the future of how we treat hard to reach cancers and diseases in the brain. We discussed the incredibly personal story behind the creation of Robeauté and Bertrand’s personal connection with the topic as well as the vision for where this technology can go. Read on to learn more about this fascinating space! 

Your robots are very different to others in the space - they’re the size of a grain of rice. How did you decide to create that technology? 

What's very important here is that medical micro robots come from the need to perform surgery in the brain. The brain is a very well-protected organ. It's protected by the skull and the blood brain barrier, which makes it very hard to reach with systemic medication. It's also very sensitive. The way that the brain is addressed in surgery is with tools that move in one direction - they are very linear tools. The protection around the brain makes it very difficult to access areas of interest or pathological areas, making it very difficult to get the right information about what's going on in the patient and what's going on during a therapy.  

Our micro robots are a tiny size that enables us to be minimally invasive, and move in the brain in 3D. We can move in the brain parenchyma and the extracellular matrix, but not in the bloodstream or vascular system. We are able to navigate into previously inaccessible locations within the brain using 2D and 3D curves, then gather data that we couldn’t have before.  

You’re pushing a new frontier with micro robotics. How do you research a new technology like that?  

In terms of the technology, there are three very difficult aspects to developing it. One is micro fabrication and creating such small devices that can propel themselves, turn and move in multiple directions safely? There is also physics to consider. We have to think about the forces that are suddenly dominant like surface forces and the forces that are not dominant at this scale, like gravity, which has almost no effect on microrobotics. It takes a lot of simulation and experimentation to get it right. We also have to consider the way that the microbiota react to the environment within the medical or neurosurgical context, because that’s another challenge for the technology. 

When it came to deciding which direction to take with the technology, we used several angles to come to a conclusion. One is very strong intuition. When we started, micro robotics were just passive probes - usually a magnet with a coating around and an external engine. If you think about how those robots would operate in the body (especially in the brain), the micro robot would be a magnet with a coating, and there will be a huge coil around the patient’s head, and that coil has to be screwed very precisely. The robot is this passive element that does applications.  

We decided not to go down that path because we wanted a micro robot that was able to work without huge equipment, which would restrict it mostly to the OCR. We wanted to be able to monitor the patient over a certain amount of days to make sure that everything in the therapy was going well. We also wanted the micro robots to have native sensors that could gather important information about the state of the patient, the evolution of the therapy and whether the doctors need to change something. We decided to have a micro robot that contains an engine and would be completely independent. We also developed a calibration and tracking system that’s based on ultrasound, in order to know what the micro robot is. We had this huge intuition to go against the trend, but we couldn't be sure it was achievable. It has been a huge challenge to achieve it, but we succeeded.  

Another direction that we took in terms of microfabrication is not to use existing technology.  At the time, the technology was very slow, the iterations were taking several months, and it was very expensive. We wanted to iterate rapidly because I knew that that was a key factor to being successful due to the fact that at this scale the physics that's dominant is different, so you need to spend months or years experimenting. Going in a different direction to the rest of the industry was a huge risk, but we found as a team we were ready to take that bet. We proceeded with a lot of help from a fantastic network of doctors, neurosurgeons, neuroscientists, roboticists, macro roboticists and other specialty practitioners, and we checked every step of the way that we were making solid building blocks. So there were a lot of skills, a lot of intuition and a lot of faith that went into making this robot. Along that way we shifted on our choice of technology, but we were set up for that journey to go all the way. 

Interested in hearing more?  

Tune into The Surgibots Podcast Podcast  

https://open.spotify.com/episode/65P8S3f1o3il2jqJHsi13w?si=c5146785ed7b4896 

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-surgibots-podcast/id1676605171?i=1000621484024