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CEOCFO Monthly Analyst |
Intuitive Surgical, Inc. ![]() Healthcare
Intuitive
Surgical, Inc. 1240
W. Middlefield Road Lonnie
M. Smith Interview
conducted by: CEOCFOinterviews.com BIO OF CEO
Lonnie
M. Smith has been President and Chief Executive Officer since May 1997 and
has served as a member of Intuitive Surgical, Inc.’s board of directors
since December 1996. From 1977 until joining Intuitive Surgical, Mr. Smith
was with Hillenbrand Industries, Inc., a public holding company, serving
as the Senior Executive Vice President, a member of the Office of the
President, and director since 1982, as Executive Vice President of
American Tourister, Inc., from 1978 to 1982, and as a Senior Vice
President of Corporate Planning from 1977 to 1978. Mr. Smith has also held
positions with The Boston Consulting Group and IBM. Mr. Smith currently
serves as a director of Biosite Diagnostics, Inc. Mr. Smith received a
B.S.E.E. from Utah State University and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business
School. About Since its inception in November 1995, Intuitive Surgical
has engaged in the development and commercialization of products that are
designed to provide the flexibility of open surgery while operating
through tiny ports. In 1999, they introduced their da Vinci™ Surgical
System and EndoWrist™ instruments. By integrating computer-enhanced
robotic technology with surgeons’ technical skills, Intuitive believes
that its System enables surgeons to perform better surgery in a manner
never before experienced. CEOCFOinterviews
- Mr. Smith,
can you give us a brief history of Intuitive Surgical, Inc? Mr. Smith:
"The company began about 5 years ago around a kitchen table in Rob
Younge's home with 3 people, Fred Moll, a general surgeon and medical
director of Guident, who had started two other companies, Rob Younge a
gifted engineer who had co-founded Acuson and John Freund, an MD and MBA
out of Harvard. They took technologies out of SRI, formerly Stanford
Research, IBM and MIT and created a product and company with the potential
to revolutionize the future surgery. The development of this technology was initially funded at
SRI by the army for the purpose of telesurgery, to allow surgeons to be in
a safe zone while performing surgery on soldiers in the battleground.
Fred Moll was intrigued by this technology, because he saw an
opportunity to separate the surgeon's hand from the tip of the instrument,
and give them far greater flexibility. Fred has been a pioneer in minimal
invasive surgery since he was an intern at the University of Washington.
He performed the first endoscopic gallbladder removal on an animal, five
years before it was ever done on a human being. The mission of our company is to take the surgery beyond
the limits of the human hand™. The human hand is a magnificent
instrument, but its disadvantage in performing surgery is its size. Our
technology, which can be described as surgical robotics, transforms the
surgeon's natural hand into a mechanical hand that is the diameter of a
pencil. It allows the surgeon to insert these tiny hands into the human
body through very small incisions and to delicately and precisely
manipulate, dissect and suture tissue, bringing the benefits of minimally
invasive surgery to broad spectrum of surgical procedures. These benefits
include less pain and trauma for the patient, lower morbidity, fewer
complications, quicker recovery, shorter hospital stay as well as lower
health care costs. That has already happened in very simple surgical procedures,
like gallbladder removal, 90% of which are now done endoscopically or
minimal invasively. However, very complex surgery, like cardiac
procedures, where we have to separate the sternum and open the chest or
radical prostectoctomy, the removal of the prostate for prostate cancer,
are still being done through large incisions. These are very painful and
bloody procedures and are very traumatic for the patient. Our
technology will allow those very complex surgeries that require delicate
tissue manipulation and suturing to be done endoscopically through small incisions. Five
years ago we took a team of scientists out of SRI and MIT and started the
company. About a year and a half later, we had a system that we could
actually use to perform surgery. The
first human surgery with the system was performed in Brussels, in March of
l997. The system was used to
perform exploratory surgery, gallbladder removal, and vascular surgery.
We knew it was safe, yet we wanted to better understand its
capability and how to improve it. We then performed cardiac surgery, the
first closed chest coronary by-pass in June of l998 in Paris, France.
Six months later, we shipped our first commercial product, the da
Vinci™ Surgical System to Leipzig, Germany. That same year the da Vinci™
was on the cover of Life Magazine,
in an issue entitled “Medical Miracles of the Next Millenium”. In June
of this past year, we received our first FDA approval for a laproscopic
use and the system is now being used in the US. We anticipate getting the
thoracoscopic approval, at the end of this quarter. This is the approval
to use the system in the chest cavity. CEOCFOinterviews
- Can you
describe the da Vinci™ system? Mr. Smith:
"The system consists of a surgical-side console and a
patient-side cart. The surgeon sits at the console and places his/her
hands on surgical manipulators and looks into a three-dimensional
operating field. On the patient's side, there are three surgical arms; two
arms hold surgical instruments with these tiny little hands at the end of
them, and the third arm holds a 3D endoscope that has two optical
channels, one for each eye. The image is transferred from the endoscope by
two high-resolution 3-chip camera heads that drive back to two
high-resolution TV screens. The surgeon sits at the console looking at his/her hands, but
sees these mechanical hands in the operating field, and these tiny
mechanical hands move just as the surgeon's hands move, with one major
advantage; large movements outside the body become very small movements
inside the body. CEOCFOinterviews
- What is the market opportunity for the da Vinci Surgical
System? |