If you've never had surgery before, it can be shocking to find out even simple
procedures mean you'll have four, five, even six incisions made in your body.
So we move the the magnet out.
Meet the surgeon who is using magnets to change that, Dr. Alberto Rodriguez-Navarro.
We're the first company in the world to develop magnetic surgery.
He is the CEO of Levita Magnetics, a company trying to make surgery simpler, more affordable, and less painful.
You reduce pain and you reduce inflammation that you do by reducing the number of decisions that means that
you have a accelerated recovery.
The Chile native stopped practicing surgery and
moved his company to Silicon Valley in 2013. Dr. Rodriguez-Navarro got the idea
from his childhood in Chile. His father, a mechanical engineer, used a set of
magnets to clean the inside of their fish tank. One on the inside guided by a
magnet on the outside. Decades later his company uses the same technique.
The surgeon puts a magnetic grasper with a small magnet attached through the
patient's belly button. He releases the small magnet onto an organ. One that
needs to be moved around for the procedure. Then, the surgeon controls a
magnetic arm on the outside of the body. It guides the magnet on the organ,
getting that organ out of the way so the surgeon can get to the area he needs to
work on. This means no extra incisions in the abdominal wall, where tools would
normally be entered to move the organs around. Fewer tools also means more space
to do the procedure. And this enables you to see better and surgeries like, it's like
driving. If you see well, you can go fast and not damage other other organs. One
catch it can only be used if you have a BMI above 20. That's an average sized
adult in the U.S. but particularly fit people can't use Levita. The magnets need
a larger body cavity space for moving your organs around. For now, Levita is
being used for abdominal surgeries only. Think obesity procedures and gallbladder
removal, the most common surgery worldwide. But usually, that surgery is
performed with four incisions today. That's a conventional way of doing it.
And we provide a way of doing it with three, two, and even one.
Levita got FDA approval in 2016, under a whole new category, magnetic surgery.
Also in 2016, Levita published results from a 50 patient clinical trial that showed no
adverse effects. It's much harder to get new technologies into the hospital and
some of the things that they want to actually show is that you're saving the
hospital money. And the translation of this less pain, meaning less pain
medications required and actually an earlier discharge from the hospital.
It's ended up being value added to the overall system. If you make the patients
recover faster and with less pain and less complication, it's a big benefit for
for society. Now it's magnets have been used in more than 500 surgeries at
Stanford, Duke, the Mayo Clinic, University of Texas Southwestern and the Cleveland
Clinic. You know it's really nice to be able to just stick it inside, retract it
up out of the way, forget about it. It almost looked like something out of
sci-fi, so I found that really cool and exciting. The future of surgery, I'm
totally convinced that we'll be we magnets and robots.
The next phase of Levita, the magnetic arms will be robotic with precise cameras. This will allow one
surgeon to perform complex procedures alone. Ones that would normally require
two surgeons and maybe one day introducing AI. So robots can actually perform the surgeries on their own.