Revolutionising colonoscopy - New Product Introduction of a painless magnetic endoscope

Early detection and treatment are crucial to improve patient quality-of-life and survival from colorectal diseases. These include cancer (which accounts for more than 881000 deaths annually worldwide) and inflammatory bowel diseases (which affect millions of individuals and increase risk of colorectal cancer). Standard colonoscopy, performed using a flexible endoscope, is currently the best method to identify disease and perform minor surgical interventions.

Unfortunately, it comes with notable drawbacks: pain for the patient, long training required for operators and high costs from the technology, staffing & dedicated infrastructure. This has several impacts, the most serious being limited procedure accessibility that is resulting in uncurbed demand for colonoscopy and enormous disease and economic burden.

This manifests in different ways; in the UK, an estimated 25% of patients wait more than 4 weeks to have their colonoscopy and more than 1 in 10 individuals are not attending colonoscopies even if tested positive by at-home tests. This is exacerbated by recent US Preventive Services Task Force guidelines recommending screening colonoscopy to begin at 45 instead of 50-years of age, increasing the potential screening population to 44 million individuals, in the US alone.

Atlas Endoscopy aims at revolutionising colonoscopy by introducing the "REN" platform - a magnetic colonoscopy system composed of a robot and recyclable single-use endoscope.

Our mission is to save lives by making colonoscopy more accessible to the population. We will do this by improving on the drawbacks of conventional flexible endoscopes. After 15-years of academic research, more than 30 peer reviewed papers (including Nature and Science), extensive pre-clinical testing and the creation of a spin-off, Atlas Endoscopy is ready to transform that research into a product, creating the technology required to deploy REN effectively and safely in hospitals for the benefit of patients, clinicians and the wider healthcare system.

This grant funding will be essential to increase the technology maturity of REN, preparing the system for safe clinical use and making Atlas Endoscopy even more attractive to investors, stakeholders and the wider UK economy. Atlas Endoscopy is committed to grow the business in the UK, create jobs, attract international investment and generate significant revenue.