MMI’s Symani surgical robot used in first U.S. clinical cases

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Editor’s Note: This article was syndicated from The Robot Report’s sibling site MassDevice.

MMI (incorporated as Medical Microinstruments) today announced the Symani surgical robotics platform’s first clinical cases in the U.S.

The two robotic-assisted microsurgical procedures were performed at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center’s Department of Orthopaedic Surgery.

Pisa, Italy-based MMI won FDA de novo classification for the Symani Surgical System in April. The system secured a CE mark in 2019 and has racked up nearly 1,000 clinical cases in the EU as of last month.

The first U.S. cases were reconstructive extremity microsurgeries, MMI said in a news release.

“In one case, the team performed a ‘free bone transfer’ procedure on a patient who suffered a traumatic injury; the procedure involved transferring a segment of bone and skin from their leg to a damaged bone in their forearm,” the company said. “The surgical team revascularized the bone segment using the microsurgical robot to reconnect the tiny blood vessels and facilitate successful transfer.”

“The second case involved a patient at risk for a leg amputation due to an infected knee prosthesis with soft tissue deficiency,” MMI continued. “The team repaired the severe knee wound with muscle and skin from the patient’s back and robotically reconnected the blood vessels to promote revascularization.”

MMI CEO Mark Toland called the first U.S. cases “a paramount milestone in the global expansion of the Symani Surgical System, and we’re honored to have been able to work with Penn Medicine, a premiere orthopedic surgery department, to achieve it.”

“Today marks the beginning of a new era in surgical innovation, as patients across the country with conditions that require complex microsurgical techniques, such as extremity reconstruction, autologous breast reconstruction post cancer resection and lymphedema repair, will now have expanded access to treatment options,” he said in the news release.

MMI designed Symani’s tiny NanoWrist instruments to help access and suture small, delicate anatomies including veins, arteries, nerves and lymphatic vessels as small as 0.3mm in diameter. It provides motion scaling and tremor reduction to allow precise micro-movements. The articulated wrist features seven degrees of freedom that match the human wrist, tremor filtration and motion scaling.

MMI has raised more than $200 million, including a $110 million Series C round in February and a $75 million Series B round in 2022.