Joana Cartocci, Robeauté - Neurosurgical Microrobots | LSI Europe '24

Joana Cartocci 00:02
Hi. I am Joana Cartocci. I am head of operations and co-founder of Robeauté, a pre-clinical stage Medtech company based in Paris, France. We intervene in the brain. The brain is a magnificent organ, and when things go well, it's extraordinary. It's where our dreams are born. But when things don't go as well, there's not much that we can do about it. And today, they don't go well for over a billion people around the world. That's one in eight of us. And these are personal stories, like the one of my co-founder, who lost his mother to glioblastoma and saw what it was like to not be able to intervene in the brain meaningfully.

So today, surgeons have a hard time accessing the brain. We were speaking just recently to the head of a very prominent medical hospital in the US, head of neurosurgery, and they were saying they could do the most perfect procedure, they could use the most cutting-edge techniques and technology, and still, after they closed the patients up, there was a chance that that patient would not survive. Today, surgeons need better tools to intervene in the brain when they're intervening surgically in the parenchyma, directly, so not in the vascular system, but in the ECM (extracellular matrix). They're limited by the stiffness and the invasiveness of current neurosurgical needles and catheters, whereas when they're intervening with medication through the systemic route, they're flooding the entire body and destroying the immune system of the patient in the hope that the right dose of medication actually makes it past the blood-brain barrier and has an effect on the target area that they're trying to reach.

So novel tools are necessary. Lack of access and lack of patient-specific information to better understand what's going on in the brain from within are two major pain points. At Robeauté, we're developing the ultimate device for the brain, a micro robot divided into two parts: the carrier that we pack with our core innovative technology and the extension that specifies its use, which can be a biopsy tool, drug cargo, sensors, or electrodes, to ultimately be able to diagnose, treat, and monitor with a single device. Microbots are extraordinary. They are minimally, no micro-invasive. They can navigate non-linearly through the brain to reach areas that are very hard to access today. They can go multi-site and explore in a way that is currently unthinkable. They can collect local, site-specific, and patient-specific data that inform surgeons and the community at large on what's going on in the brain from within.

Today, we have a system that is very lightweight, where you have the micro robot at the end of a tether cap that allows for the insertion, extraction, and tracking of the device, along with the intelligence that allows us to pre-plan the intervention, follow it live, and then wrap it up. If this sounds like science fiction, think again. Our micro robots are currently in pre-clinical trials yielding very promising results, and we are now conducting the fundamental animal trials that work as a foundation for the pure device element. Then we will go through clinical trials, and hopefully, in patients by 2026 and product by 2029 on the market.

So what can you actually do with a microbot? So much, but we're going to start with multi-point advanced tumor biopsy. There is a real unmet need to better characterize tumors, to better define the heterogeneity of a tumor. And today, with a stiff needle that moves through the parenchyma in a straight line, it's very hard to get the entire tumor profile. So we'll be able to go multi-site to multiple points around the tumor to define it better, and therefore to find better treatment that we will then go back and deliver at a later time. So once we have proven that we can safely move through the parenchyma of a patient, we will then sample for tumors, which is a larger biopsy market of 2.5 billion today. The brain biopsy market will then go back and deliver the therapeutic treatment in the brain at specific sites on the right side of the blood-brain barrier to have a better effect.

The second one is the $72 billion market, and we'll add extensions from then. So, platform technology we're developing. Our team is 15 people strong, an experienced team with a complementary skill set, and we are supported and propelled by a fantastic medical and scientific community with whom we're making sure that the technology gets to patients smoothly and fits into the hands of surgeons in the ORs in the most seamless way possible. We have raised, to date, 7 million euros, and we are currently raising a 20 million Series A round to be able to complete our pre-clinical trials, start our clinical trials, and scale operations in the US. Today, there's a real appetite for neuro devices we've seen in the field, and so we're very optimistic that we will soon be able to communicate on the successful closing of this round, and we are very excited for what's to come.

I'd like to close with an image of a brain gardener. Some of you might know this. This is from Miyazaki's Castle in the Sky, where there's a robot that takes care of this very lush garden. We see a real parallel with what we're creating: a brain gardener that will be able to tend to the brain from within, that will be able to prune, weed, replant, and stimulate growth in a pathological brain to make sure that it's always healthy and blooming.