![]() ![]() "A lot of hospitals in the 2000s were buying it so they could put up these billboards by the side of the freeway saying, 'Come to Hospital XYZ, we've got the robot!'" said Haresco. Having a da Vinci became a point of prestige for a hospital, and with that came more patients. Haresco credited not only the da Vinci system itself, but management's shrewd marketing. But every really breakthrough technology's exactly that. "In the (Silicon) Valley people talk about a technology looking for an application, and it's not always a compliment. "That was our first killer app," Smith said in his 2005 lecture. ![]() But in 2001 the company gained approval for prostatectomy, which was what really took off. approval - heart surgery was still expected to be the main market. When the company went public in June 2000 - as da Vinci was on sale in Europe but a month before its U.S. The first surgeries performed with the system, in 1998, were heart surgeries. It took a bit of trial and error to get there. The da Vinci system could make that more sophisticated. In the last few decades surgeons have mainly done this laparoscopically, by feeding tiny instruments into patients with catheters and sticks. "The whole concept that if you can avoid splitting the patient open with a 12-inch gash, they recover faster (and) it's better for everybody. "The real precedent is minimally invasive surgery," said Jose Haresco, analyst at JMP Securities. The whole thing might have stayed just a cool sci-fi idea, however, if not for an important trend in the medical business. Moll and a friend, John Freund, licensed the technology and co-founded Intuitive in Sunnyvale, Calif. Moll "thought that was a pretty lousy idea, but he was intrigued with the idea that you could separate the surgeon's hand from the tip of the instrument. "The thought was it would be used by surgeons in a safe zone operating on soldiers in the battlefield," Lonnie Smith, Intuitive's CEO from 1997 to 2010, said in a lecture at Stanford in 2005. While robot surgery is still new and its larger impact has yet to be seen, it has already changed the hospital landscape. That gives the company a lucrative 'razor / razor blade' business model. Every procedure uses instruments that Intuitive also sells, supported by its services staff. ![]() The systems were used in more than half a million surgical procedures last year. Intuitive sales topped $2.2 billion last year, and the global installed base of da Vinci systems now numbers around 3,000. "What initially attracted me to Intuitive was that it really was a paradigm shift - I know that's a very hackneyed phrase, but (it was) a paradigm shift in the way medicine was practiced," said Les Funtleyder, who formerly covered Intuitive as an analyst at Miller Tabak. That placed Intuitive among the great stocks of the past three decades. Intuitive shares shot higher, climbing 2,954% from the July 2004 breakout to their April 2012 peak. In 2004, sales surpassed $100 million and the company posted its first annual profit. Intuitive Surgical sold its first da Vinci robotic surgery system in 1999, four years after the company was founded. And he can do it from another room if he wants. A surgeon using the system can see tiny details inside a patient's body, and his hand movements are replicated by robot arms at a much smaller scale and without human tremors. Take Intuitive Surgical's (ISRG) da Vinci system.ĭa Vinci doesn't look like C3PO, Robby the Robot or anything remotely humanoid. The way robots have actually developed has been less cinematic yet more innovative. For decades, they've appeared in movies and TV shows, essentially as slaves, often with superhuman abilities but without offensive moral implications. During much of the 20th century, if you asked people what the most exciting technologies of the future would be, robots would probably have been right up there with flying cars. ![]()
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