Jonathan Sackier helped build the world's first surgical robot in the 1980s. Now he is navigating the long, expensive path to first-in-human trials for a robot designed to operate inside a magnetic resonance scanner.
Jonathan Sackier trained as a surgeon in the United Kingdom before helping pioneer laparoscopic, or minimally invasive, surgical techniques in the 1980s. That work took him to the United States, where he helped develop new surgical tools and became involved in Computer Motion, the company behind the first surgical robot. He has since been involved in starting numerous healthcare companies, taking four public and selling several others, while serving primarily as a board member, chairman or founder rather than chief executive.
His current focus is AIM Medical Robotics, where he is an investor, sits on the board, and serves as chief medical officer. The company, led by Greg Fisher, has spent fourteen years developing a robot capable of operating inside a magnetic resonance imaging environment, a technical challenge because conventional surgical robots and imaging equipment cannot function near an MRI's magnetic field. Its first application targets deep brain stimulation for patients with drug-resistant Parkinson's disease, a procedure that currently relies on capturing coordinates, fitting a frame to the patient's head, and manually guiding electrodes into place. Sackier said the process can miss its target because of brain swelling and movement once the skull is opened. The MRI-compatible robot is designed to allow real-time imaging during placement.
The technology does not yet have FDA clearance or a CE mark and remains classified as investigational. AIM Medical Robotics is preparing to begin its first human trials at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. Getting there has meant absorbing the costs and delays typical of medical device development, a field Sackier described as requiring technology, market, regulatory and intellectual property risk to be worked through before an innovation becomes commercially viable. He pointed to figures suggesting a new drug can take more than eleven years and upward of three billion dollars to bring to market, a timeline he called frustrating when set against patients who need treatment now.
Sackier's approach to that friction is shaped by lessons drawn from earlier in his career, including his experience with Computer Motion. He exited his investment at what he described as a substantial return, only to watch the stock fall sharply to a fraction of its prior value shortly afterward, a move that initially made him feel he had timed it well. Years later, however, the stock rose far beyond the price at which he sold, a reversal he now views with some regret rather than pride. He credits Bill Cook, founder of Cook Medical, with reinforcing a principle he now applies across his ventures: build for the patient's needs rather than the business first, and adoption tends to follow. He also describes innovation as something that cannot be forced, only enabled, comparing it to trying to manufacture romantic attraction rather than create conditions where it might develop.
Consistent with his approach to prior ventures, Sackier does not hold a chief executive role at AIM Medical Robotics or any of the companies he has helped start, preferring instead to work alongside people he considers more skilled in running operations. He has applied a similar philosophy to selecting collaborators throughout his career, saying he looks for people whose company he enjoys and whose values align with his own, since disagreement on fundamentals tends to derail projects further down the line.
Alongside his work in medical robotics, Sackier has spent recent years trying to close what he sees as a communication gap between the medical profession and the public, work that includes a podcast and a book series aimed at explaining medical topics in plain language.
AIM Medical Robotics is now working through the final procedural steps before its first human cases, a milestone that follows more than a decade of development work on the underlying technology.