Video Transcription
Eduardo Fonseca 00:02
Most of you arrived here today in an airplane, 500 miles an hour in a hospitable environment, and it actually should be by far the most dangerous way to travel today. It's by far the safest. Now my view is that's because of advances in technology and because of advances in regulation. I believe we are on the cusp of the next evolution of human technology, and that revolution will address stroke care. Please allow me to introduce our team. You
Eduardo Fonseca 02:00
I'm sure all of us have been touched by stroke, either ourselves or family members, but I strongly believe this is the world's greatest problem. One in four adults will have a stroke in their life, and two-thirds will have a significantly adverse outcome on the economics. It's hard to put numbers together when you're discussing around world GDP; 0.7% of everything that humanity produces is spent dealing with stroke therapy and, most importantly, stroke disability. And it's increasing. 80 million people today have some form of stroke disability.
Eduardo Fonseca 02:49
As of 2015, there has been a revolution in therapy, a therapy that turned two-thirds of adverse events into two-thirds of positive outcomes. And as you can clearly see in the graph, this therapy is one that we as humanity need to ensure is delivered timely to patients around the world. The problem is only 2.8% of humanity, on average, has access to timely mechanical thrombectomy, and it's very largely concentrated in the developed world. What XCath does is it significantly decreases the time for a patient to get access to timely care. Patients that are diagnosed most often have to be transported if they have access to therapy, and XCath's mission is to deliver that care to the patient on site. XCath develops two very distinct products that work together. The first is a tele-robot, and you can take pictures. That's a very, very old generation. And the other is the world's first 0.014 steerable guide wire. I'll go briefly in depth. We started XCath in 2017; robotics makes easy things hard. It's really hard to emulate physicians' movements through robotic motors, and it makes hard things very easy. It locks devices into place. Robotics and endovascular robotics is one of those things that works really well in labs, and once it's transferred to a practical clinical setting and clinical reality and human factors are added to it, it's actually quite complex. We intend to do so; we're design frozen now, and we intend to do the first in man in the beginning of next year.
Eduardo Fonseca 06:06
Now we thought, how can we demonstrate this life-changing procedure in an exaggerated setting, to prove the viability of the technology? We were invited by the Abu Dhabi Global Healthcare Week to present the concept of the future of stroke care. And instead of presenting a concept and a presentation, we thought, well, why don't we actually try to do a demo in front of a live audience? And we took the challenge of finding complete adverse events, 6900 kilometers of distance, peak network times in front of a public audience for the first time. And I'm glad to report that the procedure in a model was done with 153 millisecond peak latency using only public networks. So I'll show a quick video on this procedure, the requirement of healthcare spending by providing treatment to those most in need.
Eduardo Fonseca 06:06
What you are going to witness here is, for the first time, a demonstration of the remote control of the robotic arm, not with a cable, not with a wire. From here, Abu Dhabi to South Korea. So as you can see on the screen, there is a blood clot simulated in blue. And now I'm here with the controllers. I'm actually navigating the wires that you saw in the video. So here we see no latency; every movement I've been doing here I can actually see exactly what it's translating into the robotic arm and the optimum latency, which is the eye and hand coordination of our brains. It's around 200 milliseconds robotics.
Fred Moll 06:55
and healthcare. It's just getting started. What you've seen is the very front end of a new generation of robotic devices. Congratulations.
Eduardo Fonseca 07:06
Thank you very much.
Eduardo Fonseca 07:19
So now we go into the product. Miniaturizing devices is very difficult, and we have developed the world's first 0.014 fully electrically deflectable guide wire. Only the tip deflects; the back end doesn't torque. And that has solved the large problem of how do you recreate physician steerability in a robotic device. It also works independently, and that's also been designed frozen. AI plays a very important component of our device, and Dr. James Tudor leads our program. We envision AI as a proctor and as a security aid for cybersecurity and network effects. That's the team. These are by far the most driven, passionate, talented people that I have ever worked with. They have been in Korea for months now doing the V&V for the robot, and they'll continue to be there. These guys have seen it all from many different arenas and are incredibly driven and passionate about what we do. And with that, just a short recap of XCath; it's very deep technology mode, unique USPS, and incredibly focused and driven on solving what we consider to be the world's greatest problem. And with that, I'd like to thank all of you and hope you have a great conference. Thank you. Applause.
