On April 17th, TransEnterix (TRXC) hosted an analyst event and had an expert panel of surgeons share their experience with the Surgibot to other practicing surgeons and investors during the 2015 SAGES event in Tennessee. These surgeons completed several laparoscopic procedures in porcine models, which were part of TransEnterix’s GLP studies. The company also had a Surgibot at the event and demonstrated its use to the audience. Below highlights a few important statements from the expert panel of surgeons that, to me, confirm my bullish thesis on TransEnterix. To listen to the entire event and look at the full slide deck, click here.

“Surgibot has a very efficient setup docking, keeps my room turnover times low, I really like to do maximal efficiency: as many cases as I can, and robotics in the past has interfered with that.” Low turnover times for OR improves hospital efficiency and cuts down on costs. 

“The ease of use is very easy, I can use this in more than one room….It’s a very easy learning curve, my second case went down to about a third of what the first case was. It’s very natural, I hate to use the word intuitive, but I already knew how to move the [Surgibot] instruments because they [TransEnterix] capitalized off what we already trained, and duplicated that very quickly.” An easy learning curve can help speed up the rate of adoption of Surgibot among the surgical community.

“Unfortunately my assistants are kind of just standing there now. They don’t really like the idea of coming into the room and doing nothing or being replaced but it does allow me to not have to schedule and worry about an assistant being there so I see great application with that.” Another big cost saving metric that will help Surgibot generate ROI for hospitals in a short period of time. 

“Our OR efficiency looks like it will be much better with this than it is currently [laparoscopic based procedures], and certainly with Da Vinci. There’s a broad range of general surgery procedures which we call the bread and butter that this has application to.” Broad procedure applicability for Surgibot appeals to both large and small hospitals/surgery centers. 

“The key to surgery is being able to triangulate, and what the Surgibot gives me is with a single port, triangulation. That allows me to come in at different angles that I can’t do with any other straight standard laparoscopic instrument.” TransEnterix is aiming to convert laparoscopic procedures to SurgiBot, where as Intuitive Surgical (ISRG) took the route of converting open surgeries to da Vinci. Therefore, while most investors will peg ISRG as a direct competitor to TRXC, more appropriate direct competitors would be Ethicon and Covidien.