HAYWARD, CA — Endiatx, a pioneering Silicon Valley medical technology company, is shaping the future of medicine with groundbreaking micro-robotics inside the human body. The company’s flagship innovation, PillBot, is designed to wirelessly navigate the human stomach, lowering costs and increasing access to diagnosis and treatments.
Would you swallow a micro-robot? To many, it seems like something straight out of science fiction. However, at the TED and Amazon MARS conferences, Endiatx Co-Founder Dr. Vivek Kumbhari, live on stage, navigated PillBot through the stomach of Endiatx Chairman Alex Luebke. Kumbhari, who chairs Gastroenterology at the Mayo Clinic, described how PillBot’s simple means of investigating the stomach will greatly improve medical care.
The PillBot micro-robot, about the size of a vitamin pill, transmits live video as it motors throughout the water-filled stomach. After skipping a meal, a patient drinks water and swallows PillBot. The physician operator – who can be remote, with the patient at home – then maneuvers the capsule via a controller and internet connection to scan the whole stomach.
See PillBot showcased in an engaging TED talk and video by Adam Savage (of Mythbusters, The Matrix, and Star Wars fame).
PillBot will complete its clinical trials later in 2024, and Endiatx expects the device to gain FDA clearance in 2025. PillBot should launch commercially in the US in early 2026 and from there expand internationally – especially to developing nations that lack access to medical facilities.
Since four out of five upper endoscopies do not detect anything, PillBot™ will save many patients the discomfort of sedation and a hospital visit, plus provide payers with a much more economical cost. At the same time, PillBot™ will steer limited hospital infrastructure and resources toward the fraction of cases where an initial PillBot screening has deemed a full upper endoscopy necessary.
With future AI-enabled movement, automation, and diagnostics, PillBot will become even more efficient, enabling systematic screening plus acute care. Diagnostic procedures performed by PillBot and its AI-powered successors will identify diseases such as stomach cancer – which claims some 800,000 lives globally each year – early enough to intervene and save lives.
Endiatx, a team of 20, has raised $7 million since its 2019 founding.
