by
Olga Deshchenko, DOTmed News Reporter | July 01, 2010
There are somewhere between 400 and 500 different patents on the da Vinci Surgical System, according to Cukic. The company is also the only manufacturer of all the parts and the specific software for the robot. Cukic says that competition that exists today consists of other ways to manage an illness or disease, like using pharmacological and radiological approaches. Cukic says the company does expect to face competition in the future, although there are many technical, clinical and physical challenges to getting into the robotic surgery business.
"From a direct robotic approach, there really isn't anybody who is doing what we are doing," he says.
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Dr. Nguyen hopes that the arrival of other competitors in the future will eventually drive down the cost of robotic surgery.
"They are a business and I don't blame them. Their goal is to sell robots. And for me, as a physician, I'm not so happy with that. I want my industry to be my collaborators, I want them to work with me," he says.
Intuitive Surgical plans to continue on the path of its current business model, says Cukic.
"There is a lot of open surgery that we believe we can help convert to minimally invasive surgery," he says. Over the long term, I think what we'd really like to do is penetrate and add value to many of those open operations by improving the efficacy or reducing the invasiveness."
The O/R of the future
Despite the challenges, robotic surgery is here to stay. In addition to urological cancers, cervical and endometrial cancers are also being addressed using the robotic method. There is a growing interest around complex benign hysterectomies and head and neck surgeries. Just recently, transoral procedures received the go ahead for the robotic method.
Dr. Vipul Patel
of Global Robotics
Institute and Florida
Hospital
"It allows surgeons to actually operate inside of the mouth and remove things like base of tongue cancers that historically have required very disfiguring surgeries and jaw splitting operations," says Cukic. "And now, they're going in through the natural orifice of the mouth and are able to reach down to the base of the tongue with better visualization and controls and remove those cancers."
