The “gardener for the brain” — Robeauté’s microscopic robot will transform neurosurgery

In December 1959, theoretical physicist Richard Feynman gave a lecture to the American Physical Society in Pasadena, titled Plenty of Room at the Bottom.

“I would like to describe a field, in which little has been done, but in which an enormous amount can be done in principle,” he said. “What I want to talk about is the problem of manipulating and controlling things on a small scale.”

Feynman’s assertion, that tackling the physics of miniaturisation “would have an enormous number of technical applications,” holds true today. Innovators are naturally drawn to challenges on a grand scale — whether it’s designing nuclear fusion reactors or SpaceX Raptor engines — but, 65 years on from that talk in Pasadena, there is still a lot of unexplored space as you go smaller.

One urgent problem we can help solve by going smaller with technology is how we understand and treat brain disease — a relatively unexplored frontier in healthcare with poor treatment options across the board, and one that kills young people at horrifically high rates.

Brain cancers are the biggest cancer killer of children and people under 40. Brain disorders more broadly account for 15% of global healthcare burden, surpassing both cardiovascular diseases and other types of cancer, in large part because our treatment options for these conditions are woefully under-developed.

Paris-based Robeauté is a startup that is taking on this frontier by combining entrepreneurial scar tissue, a world-leading microrobotics team and a deeply personal founder story to develop a robot the size of a grain of rice that can navigate the brain, deliver drug payloads, take biopsies and gather data. No other company in the world has developed technology of this tiny size that can drive, steer and locate itself in the brain.

And this is not just a lovely mission to help sick people: Robeauté is building in a space that’s proven itself as one of the few areas of robotics that is actually making money. As robot-assisted surgery has rapidly grown — from being used in 1.8% of operations in the US in 2012 to 15.1% 2018 — it has created multi-billion-dollar acquisitions and one of the most valuable robotics companies in the world in Intuitive Surgical, with a market cap of $195bn.

In short, Robeauté has developed unique technology in a highly valuable and booming sector, with the potential to help treat some of the most horrible diseases in the world.

Breakthrough technology

To understand how much of a difference this startup could make, it’s worth noting how frankly medieval our processes for treating brain diseases are today. 

To take biopsies, we essentially have to stick a metal spike through the skull. To deliver medicines to the brain we flood the whole body with drugs, as only a fractional amount gets through the blood-brain barrier — a protective layer of cells that keeps harmful substances out of the brain, but also prevents the entry of most pharmacological treatments.

Rather than inserting a rigid needle that can only reach a single point of the brain, or slamming patients with huge quantities of drugs, Robeautés technology opens up more subtle and targeted treatment options. Its robot can navigate around the brain without damaging it, taking biopsies from multiple locations and delivering drugs to the areas that need them. 

It can also gather data to develop our understanding of how treatments work, creating a whole new surgical platform that will shed light on this vital but under-researched area of medicine.

Developing a robot of such a tiny size — less than 2mm in width — has involved multiple incredible feats of engineering, using hyper-precision machines to fabricate microscopic components like motors, gears, data gathering sensors, and extensions to implant electrodes and sample tissue. 

Robeauté has solved the hard underlying technical problems to make this possible, and has been testing the robot in animal brains and cadavers and this fresh round of capital will allow it to begin trials in humans. 

A team on a mission

It has taken an exceptional team to get to this point and CEO Bertrand Duplat is a founder who’s building something for a higher purpose than simply generating financial returns. He founded the company after feeling helpless when his mother tragically died of a brain tumor that was incurable with existing treatments.

Alongside this personal passion, he brings with him a 30-year career developing semiconductors and advanced robotics, having founded four other startups along the way, selling one of them — 3D software company Virtools — to Dassault Systems in 2005.

He’s joined by cofounder Joana Cartocci, who has more than 15 years experience in operations management behind her, and sat on the board of directors of France Biotech. Their combined networks have helped them not just build technology, but also an ecosystem around their platform, partnering with the long-established leader in digital neurosurgery and precision radiotherapy, Brainlab, while assembling an advisory board of some of the world's experts in neurosurgery.

And, from their HQ in Paris, Bertrand and Joana have tapped one of the world’s top breeding grounds for both surgical and robotic research — the Sorbonne university — to hire a team with multiple PHDs in microrobotics.

The “robot gardener”

The technology this team has built doesn’t just have the potential to transform neurosurgery — it could also fundamentally change how drug companies find the best solutions for patients. 

Gathering patient brain data will teach us more about diseases that are often incurable, enabling more personalised treatment. It fits into Plural’s wider thesis that led us to back precision medicine startup Sano Genetics: that healthcare will become more data-driven and bespoke for individual patient needs.

I believe that Robeauté’s miniature robots — that will go inside our body, help repair us and then leave — could transform brain treatments in the same way the endoscope has transformed gastrointestinal medicine, for a part of our body that is so vital to our quality of life. Bertrand has compared his vision for the technology to the Studio Ghibli anime film Laputa: Castle in the Sky, where robot gardeners help tend a blooming natural environment on a floating island.

“We want to be able to weed the neurons that are pathological, we want to support the neurons and cells and help them thrive in the recovering brain,” he says.

And, given the desperate need for brain disease breakthroughs, Robeauté could benefit from an accelerated clinical trial pathway to FDA clearance, as regulators urgently seek better ways to treat these awful conditions.

Bold explorers

History teaches us how going smaller with innovation lets us grow new branches of the tech tree that create enormous value and impact. Just look at how TSMC in Taiwan and ASML in the Netherlands have between them created more than a trillion dollars in market capitalisation by building the technology to enable nanoscale semiconductor technology.

By going small, Robeauté will allow us to explore a new frontier, like the underexplored deep ocean, where better technology could save lives and suffering while generating huge business value. Its team will be in the US regularly next year, and are ready to meet prospective partners who want to understand to know what their microrobots are capable of.

Finally, this $27m round from a stellar syndicate of investors in the US and Europea is a statement that we mustn’t under-capitalise European ambition. Founders like Bertrand and Joana — who have launched the most technically ambitious company in the world in this space — deserve bold backers, who can help give them a shot of being the global winner from Europe.