The new frontiers of surgical robotics and translational medicine 

17 May 2017 - Surgical robots that are increasingly smaller and capable not only of operating with greater precision, but also of predicting and preventing diseases. Translational technologies and tools capable of detecting and analyzing the individual response to drugs. The present and the imminent future of scientific research were discussed in the Research Day 2017 with two world experts in the field of robotics and clinical trials: Guang Zhong Yang, director and co-founder of the Hamlyn Center for Robotic Surgery at Imperial College London, and Garret A. FitzGeraldProfessor of Translational Medicine and Pharmacology at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine.

“Surgical robotics, in these 25 years, has evolved from a niche research to an area of ​​greatest development in the field of medical engineering, so much so that in 2020 an investment in the field of surgical and diagnostic robots of 17,9 billion is expected dollars, with an annual growth rate of 13 percent", explained Guang-Zhong Yang, according to whom "the trend of the future is to nanoscopic scale robots, specialized on single types of intervention and starting to make decisions, perhaps by reacting to the surgeon's visual commands only, but he cannot be replaced".

Looking to the future also characterized the speech by Fitzgerald, known for having discovered the cardiological use of aspirin, who underlined how "the emergence of translational tools and technologies for analyzing the variability of patient response to drugs hold promise for precision medicine". “The challenge – said the scientist – will now be to guarantee equitable access to the benefits of these advances within the current drug business model". overcoming the preclinical phase and carrying out phase one and phase two of human trials on ever smaller numbers of patients, in order to bring the time of marketing closer".

But the Day also allowed the Vice Rector for Research, Eugenio Guglielmelli, to take stock of the state of the art of research intoUniversità Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, with a special mention to three research experiences UCBM in the fields of Process Engineering, Oncology and Biochemistry.

Finally, the new objectives for the next three years, the subject of an internal tender which will be launched during the year and which will allow the new lines of research to be projected onto an international dimension. The first concerns the genetic and epigenetic "biomarkers for precision medicine", capable of improving the appropriateness and therefore the effectiveness and economic sustainability of diagnostic and therapeutic approaches mainly of oncological and onco-haematological diseases.
 
The second project is that of the "Hospital 4.0", with health services centered on the person and based on the high digitization and automation of health processes. A new hospital model, also distributed throughout the territory, which exploits all the emerging smart technologies: miniaturized sensors, wearable devices, advanced robotics, data archiving systems and anything else needed to improve the effectiveness and sustainability of care for chronic and acute patients, but also to promote prevention and active ageing.

>> Press release
>> Photo gallery
>> Videos of the day

Downloadable Materials