Press Release on Acrobot Fundraising 30th July 2007
Imperial Innovations Group plc, the technology commercialisation and investment company today announces that it has closed an investment in The Acrobot Company Limited (Acrobot), a company focusing on computer assistance for orthopaedic surgery. The investment was part of a £2.6 million funding round which was co-led by London Technology Fund and PUK Ventures.
The overall goal of Acrobot’s technologies is to provide speed, accuracy and reproducibility, which will lead ultimately to minimally-invasive, bone-conserving, orthopaedic surgery. Acrobot is based on the pioneering research of Professor Brian Davies of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Professor Justin Cobb in the Faculty of Medicine, both at Imperial College London.
Acrobot has developed and clinically proven a range of products in three key areas related to orthopaedic surgery: computer-assisted 3D planning, surgical navigation and surgeon-controlled robotic surgery. Acrobot® Planner creates a pre-operative plan, according to which the bone is prepared and the implant positioned using Acrobot’s unique surgical navigation system, Acrobot® Navigation, which tracks the position of surgical instruments relative to the patient to ensure highly accurate surgery. In the third area, Acrobot’s key ‘active constraint’ technology confines a bone cutting tool to a defined volume in space, allowing the surgeon to shape the bone to receive a joint replacement implant. This simple, universally applicable, surgeon-controlled robotic solution would replace conventional instrumentation, enabling better bone preparation and more accurate implant positioning.
The company is now poised to move forward to full commercialisation of its Planner and Navigation technologies and will further develop its ‘active constraint’ technology for robotic applications. The Acrobot® Navigation product has been developed by Acrobot in collaboration with Corin Group PLC (Corin) to enable accurate implantation of Corin’s lead product – the Cormet® metal on metal hip resurfacing implant. Many orthopaedic surgeons are now using the products, enabling them to plan and perform hip resurfacing surgery more accurately.
Graeme Brookes, CEO of Acrobot, said:
Acrobot was founded by Brian Davies, Professor of Medical Robotics in the Department of Mechanical Engineering of Imperial College London, and Justin Cobb, Professor of Orthopaedics of Imperial College London and a leading Orthopaedic Surgeon.
The company’s products and services centre on the application of computer science, mechanical, electrical, and electronics engineering disciplines to surgery. The technology and the derived medical devices are intended to assist surgical staff, enabling new procedures to be performed and existing procedures to be carried out to a higher level of accuracy whilst also leading to minimally-invasive operations. Acrobot’s portfolio includes Acrobot® Planner, which offers pre-operative surgical planning and visualisation software; the Acrobot® Navigation System, which provides computer-assistance by tracking the spatial locations of tools and patient and depicting them against a pre-operative plan on a computer screen to be used by the surgeon as guidance; and the Acrobot® Sculptor Robotic System, a motorised programmable device which uses ‘active constraint’ to prevent a surgeon accidentally moving outside a specified area. These systems will be further developed to assist minimally-invasive surgery in orthopaedics.
