Eydos-Medicine, a resident of the Biomed Cluster of the Skolkovo Foundation and a leading Russian integrated developer of robotic simulators, supplied the first Surgery Simulator to US-based company Covidien, a major global manufacturer of medical equipment.
The official handover ceremony for the Surgery Simulator was held at the Covidien doctor training center in Istanbul, Turkey on May 7. In an interview given to sk.ru, Lenar Valeyev, the CEO of Eydos-Medicine, stressed the importance of this event both for the company and for the industry as a whole. “For the first time a Russian company operating in this highly innovative medical market where annual global sales are about one billion dollars, has sold simulators (endoscopic surgery simulators) to a major global manufacturer of medical equipment,” Mr. Valeyev said. He also went on to point out that the trials of the new equipment that were carried out in Istanbul, Turkey, home to the Covidien training center, were attended by leading experts and specialists of the company, including Covidien CEO José Almeida.
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“The company CEO personally tested our equipment, and based on his personal experience and what his colleagues had to say he concluded it was very good equipment, deciding to have it installed at the other Covidien training centers, and Covidien has over ten training centers around the world,” Lenar Valeyev said. Thus, this means a very large market, seeing how the training center in Istanbul alone needs 12 hybrid operating room simulators. According to Lenar Valeyev, further down the road Eydos-Medicine plans to partner up with Covidien to develop and promote new equipment. The US corporation will help further development, marketing and sales of the equipment to other companies and health care providers interested in buying medical simulators. “We are the only company that mass produces this kind of equipment in Russia. In the world there are just five companies operating in this segment,” Eydos-Medicine CEO was quoted as saying.
The hybrid surgery simulator is a full-fledged operating room simulator for the training and professional development of practicing surgeons, capable of simulating the entire range of methodologies and equipment offered by Covidien and of running simulations for any kind of surgery. A robot manufactured by Eydos acts as a patient. Just like a human being, before the operation the robot remains “fully conscious” until it is put under anesthesia at which point the robot “goes to sleep” and as the surgery proceeds the robot’s internals respond to every surgical intervention into the “body”.
“This system simulates every single bodily function that you will find in an actual patient during surgery in a real operating room, including surgical complications and the anesthesia parameters required by this type of surgery,’ Valeyev explains.
Eydos-Medicine regards Covidien as a global high-tech partner with a huge global network to distribute its equipment. “We have developed a training complex for this specific corporation for their tools and equipment, and it is extremely relevant today as Covidien’s methodologies are totally unique and take a long time to learn, so a medical simulator that mimics the human anatomy is pretty much the only real alternative to training on humans that doctors who need to learn these tools have access to," Lenar Valeyev said.
Today Skolkovo resident Eydos-Medicine is thinking of partnering up with Covidien to set up a joint engineering center for the development of medical simulators in Skolkovo. The company also sees great potential in the development of the domestic market for medical simulators.
“Foreign simulators are priced at around 10 million rubles, a robot patient is rather expensive, which means we have got a great opportunity to offer replacements for imports,” Valeyev says. "The company is getting support from a variety of state organizations. Russia’s Healthcare Ministry plans to set up at least eighty training centers and allocate significant funds to buy medical simulators for them and if we get invited to participate in this program, then with state support we can develop simulators for 32 medical professions,” Eydos-Medicine CEO stressed.
Gelena Lifshitz, chief project manager for the New Methods of Internal Diseases Therapy at the Biomedical Technologies Cluster in Skolkovo had this to say about Eydos-Medicine’s breakthrough:
Eydos-Medicine is one of the first Russian companies to have managed to develop top-quality training simulators at a cost comparable to that of foreign competition. The main feature that this sort of equipment simply must have is that the sensations of a surgeon as he or she is performing simulated surgery must be as close as possible to what a real operation feels like. This, among other things, means that such parameters as, for example, the resistance of the tissue as the scalpel breaks it must be simulated as accurately as possible. The best medical simulators also help plan surgeries by first performing the most challenging bits on a manikin that’s been set up to mimic a specific patient,” Gelena Lifshitz said. “Eydos-Medicine has managed to create exactly this kind of equipment. It closely recreates the experiences of a surgeon during an operation by providing the surgeon with effective feedback from the manikin robot and the other equipment of the simulator. It is a huge technological advantage. And having succeeded in creating this high-tech product at very competitive prices, it was not long before the company started getting inquiries from major players in this market,” Gelena Lifshitz said. According to Ms. Lifshitz, at the moment major federal medical centers across Russia, among other countries, are getting this kind of high-tech equipment. This market holds a lot of promise. The growth is especially fast for the training of endovascular surgeons (they operate on blood vessels). Further growth of this market in Russia depends to a large extent on what requirements are set for the training of surgeons and, in particular, requirements for how many hours they must work on simulators. Chief Project Manager at Biomedical Technologies Cluster
Eydos-Medicine is one of the first Russian companies to have managed to develop top-quality training simulators at a cost comparable to that of foreign competition. The main feature that this sort of equipment simply must have is that the sensations of a surgeon as he or she is performing simulated surgery must be as close as possible to what a real operation feels like. This, among other things, means that such parameters as, for example, the resistance of the tissue as the scalpel breaks it must be simulated as accurately as possible. The best medical simulators also help plan surgeries by first performing the most challenging bits on a manikin that’s been set up to mimic a specific patient,” Gelena Lifshitz said. “Eydos-Medicine has managed to create exactly this kind of equipment. It closely recreates the experiences of a surgeon during an operation by providing the surgeon with effective feedback from the manikin robot and the other equipment of the simulator. It is a huge technological advantage. And having succeeded in creating this high-tech product at very competitive prices, it was not long before the company started getting inquiries from major players in this market,” Gelena Lifshitz said.
According to Ms. Lifshitz, at the moment major federal medical centers across Russia, among other countries, are getting this kind of high-tech equipment. This market holds a lot of promise. The growth is especially fast for the training of endovascular surgeons (they operate on blood vessels). Further growth of this market in Russia depends to a large extent on what requirements are set for the training of surgeons and, in particular, requirements for how many hours they must work on simulators.
Chief Project Manager at Biomedical Technologies Cluster