Endiatx Founder & CEO - update on the Robotic Pill-Bot

Dustin, thanks a lot for, uh, for having us over. We're just very excited. Basically, Endiotix is all about creating tiny pill robots that can go inside the human body. And so our real vision is for rice-grain-sized robots to go inside your brain, do brain surgery, stuff like that. But we think it makes sense to start with something in the GI tract. So we were very much inspired by the world of pill cameras, where you can swallow a multivitamin-sized pill and it just takes pictures as it goes through your body. So our Our question is, you know, could we make a pill camera that could move around? So we actually have a little quad pump jet propulsion system for this prototype here. And the idea is, if you've ever seen a quadcopter flying through the air, you can see those things move side to side, up and down, they can turn and spin around in space. That's what we've created with our propulsion system. And so the goal is to make a diagnostic capsule that a doctor can drive through a patient in real time basically giving all the diagnostic and therapeutic power of an endoscope, but with no sedation, with no risk of perforation. There's no intrusive nature to it. It's just a pill that you swallow. So the exciting thing now is we're finally on the verge of a first-in-human demo. This prototype in my hands right here is, you know, kind of like the, the scariest pill I think anyone would ever expect to swallow. This is not for the clinic, but this will be under careful supervision going into a person in a couple of weeks and demonstrating for the first time ever real active propulsion inside the human body with a remote capsule. So one thing I'd like to show you is that, you know, when I say quadcopter submarine, it's kind of a cool set of buzzwords, but what does that actually mean? Well, I'd like to show you what our brilliant co-founder James Urd came up with. So if I pop off this housing, what we get here are 4 little propellers. And this is where it actually kind of— it should actually start to ring the bells of quadcopter. By differentially thrusting these 4 little propellers, we are able to achieve a full 6 degrees of freedom motion, which means we should be able to glide through the body and follow the curvature and the twists and turns. But not just that, we want to be able to find a problem and then zero in on it and enter a station-keeping mode where the propulsion system in combination with some accelerometers is able to just hover in place and now the doctor doesn't have to act like the Magic School Bus driver, right? Now the doctor can think and act like a doctor and they can go closer, they can start bringing out surgical tools, they can use different propulsion inputs like say, "Hey, bring me closer, rotate me around to the right." You know, like, I don't want people to be so busy bus driving that they can't actually start doing the job of the doctor, right? And this is where a 6-degree-of-freedom motion system is hugely enabling. There are many academic efforts underway to make pills move. Since the '90s, people have been trying to do this. But if you look at the vast majority of motion within the body, robotics attempts, it's almost all linear, like forward and backward, right? We are so excited to be saying, like, not only do we want to move, but we want to be able to basically give you what the human wrist can do, right? We want this to be the tip of that scalpel, and we just want the robot to be that wrist. It's super exciting. So the really exciting thing is our journey through Founder Institute started with literally clicking on a Facebook ad. It said, you know, come practice pitch your idea. And at that point, Endiotix, which means endoscopy diagnostics and treatment, at that point Endiotix was just a napkin sketch basically. And so we go through the Founder Institute, they taught us how to incorporate, retain a lawyer, start getting our IP protected, basically how to create a company. Immediately thereafter, we raised $185K in the Funding Lab program. And that's when we finally were able to build what we call PoolBot. And so PoolBot is basically Raspberry Pi hardware. Like, a junior high school kid could build something like this these days. But it was a chance to prototype and test quad pump-jet propulsion. And so it was the first time we ever created actual hardware and had it remotely operating and sending a camera signal. So we have a number of patents in the pipeline, but our One patent that has a priority date of June 28th, 2019, it's an active provisional application that's underway, is imaging device with propulsion capabilities. And we go very deeply into why a quad pump jet is so awesome. So PoolBot was enough to tell our investors that we were creating real hardware, but it was very important to start the process of miniaturizing it. And so from there we got to what we called Fishtank Bot, and this was a little smaller, still quite janky, but it was the first time we had custom electronics. Our brilliant CTO Dan Moyer does all of the electronic design in-house, and that gives us the ability on the mechanical side to sort of marry the mechanical worlds with the electrical engineering worlds and without having an impasse between those two areas. It's been a big deal for us. James Urd, our other co-founder, is the guy who's been sort of feverishly designing the pump-jet system and coming up with all the amazing shapes that the fluid has to flow around. Because as we finally approach a scale that needs to go into a person, we're kind of marrying a lot of the quadcopter technological side of things with what's going to work within the human body. Right? So a lot of the things that matter to us are sort of unique. So no sharp edges, right? You know, how do you make a quadcopter that has no exposed propellers, that has no sharp edges? There's a lot of fun thinking that goes into that. So this guy, this guy we're very proud of, of little PilBot One here, because it is sort of for the first time demonstrating, you know, that we can communicate through a radio This radio is capable of communicating through several feet of water, so it's a very low-frequency radio, and we're working very hard to get the camera data compressed and transmitted with enough frames per second. We're basically trying to play Mario Kart inside the human body. And, you know, for the purposes of finding things that would be You know, maybe it's difficult to scope someone's small intestine with a scope. It's very hard to reach in there. But for us, that should be easy. We think that we could be doing someone's, say, you know, colonoscopy. Like, Joe the plumber needs to get a colonoscopy. You know, why not, while we're passing the bile duct, let's send a little probe in there. Let's look for early stages of pancreatic cancer. We're losing almost 60,000 Americans every year or two to pancreatic cancer. And one of the biggest problems with that is it's hard to diagnose at an early stage. Usually people get that at stage 4 when it's symptomatic and it's terrifying. I mean, it's like traditionally like 97% fatal at that point. But if we were catching it 10 years earlier because it was trivial for us to go looking for it, when we're doing a colonoscopy, that's just one out of many reasons why we think that the concept of remote robots inside the human body has value. And while this guy's biggest weapon right now is just the eyeball that's front and center, believe it or not, we're just a couple of months out from the first prototypes on what we call Pill Surgeon, right? If we're gonna go to a place and we're gonna find problems, we want to actually be able to treat and solve and go after those problems. That's what, you know, Rx in the medical world means prescription, Tx means treatment, and that's the Tx in Endiotics. And so the pill surgeon, we think, represents, you know, kind of the major version of this vision being brought to bear. We're not just trying to take a passive pill camera, make it active, and then kick back. right? We feel that this is a platform we want to stand on to start doing intervention. And then we're not done in the GI tract. We think we can make these things smaller than a grain of rice in time, right? And go to other parts of the body. So our goal with PillSurgeon, and right now we have a gastroenterologist just combing the records and looking at every tool you can put on an endoscope or a colonoscope. And Endiotix right now is building a list, right? This is our target list. I want to know everything you can do with one of these traditional scopes because I want to offer that and more with our line of products, right? I want the pill surgeon to be able to pull ultrasound images from inside the bile duct to not only see lesions on the inside of, say, the bile duct, but also to see through the tissue wall and see if there's a lump of tissue growing that looks weird. That could be a stage 1 or a stage 2, right? If we can catch that, we're basically giving the oncologist a 10-year head start on this thing. And I, you know, I am not an oncologist and I will never say that it's trivial even to cure a stage 1 pancreatic cancer. But I do feel that if we can give oncologists many years in advance, I think that's gonna do some good. Right? So we wanna pull ultrasound images. We definitely wanna do biopsy. So it's— there's a term called needle biopsy where you can poke a little needle into tissue and break off a tiny little piece. Absolutely. But we don't really wanna stop there because that's still kind of closer to like the diagnostic side. We wanna get into treatment. We want to snip polyps. Alright? I wanna cut a polyp that's growing. And remove it and carry it for, for analysis, but also do the surgery that removes it. We want to cauterize bleeds, right? And that means that if need be, we may actually be bringing in wireless power that we beam onto this, which is another part of the IP that we're developing. The idea here is anything you can do with a scope, we want to do that and more with these robots.