THE BLOG

Nice: Caranx Medical Laboratories are one of the winners of the i-Nov Innovation Contest.

Established in Nice in 2021, with the support of Invest in Côte d’Azur, Caranx Medical Laboratories are developing autonomous robots that can perform totally automated endovascular (heart valve replacement) or endoscopic (obesity surgery) procedures.

Founded by Truffle Capital Fund, Caranx Medical is developing a technology that combines imaging data, artificial intelligence, and mini-robotics. This aims to standardize complex surgical procedures, thereby increasing safety and accessibility for clinicians and patients.

The location of their laboratories, facing the airport and the sea, contributes to the creativity and productivity of the Caranx teams. The team is organized around Dr. Eric Séjor (Chief Medical Officer), a former surgeon at CHU de Nice, and Pierre Berthet Rayne, Ph.D. (Technical Director), a former engineer from the Imperial College of Science, Technology, and Medicine in London.

Winners in the health category, Caranx Medical Laboratories are carrying out the Asclepios project, which benefits from a grant of 1.6M€ out of a total amount of nearly 4.6M€.

The Asclepios project aims to develop a flexible robot, equipped with supervised partial autonomy and integrated artificial intelligence, in order to transform bariatric surgery into a simple, safe procedure, performed through the mouth, and accessible to a larger number of practitioners, surgeons, and gastroenterologists.

Caranx Medical’s ambition is to revolutionize the field of surgery by offering the first intelligent robots with partial autonomy, supervised by the practitioner. The value brought by the robots lies in reducing the complexity of procedures, standardizing and democratizing the technical gesture, and above all in improving the quality of care by reducing patient morbidity and mortality.

The Asclepios project aims to develop a robot capable of performing a minimally invasive bariatric procedure (through the mouth, without abdominal incisions), on an outpatient basis and executable by a larger number of practitioners, offering more patients the efficiency of surgery without its complications. This solution is particularly disruptive and potentially represents a revolution comparable to interventional cardiology that has revolutionized cardiac surgery.

Indeed, the surgical robots currently on the market or under development require the systematic and constant intervention of the practitioner. Asclepios will be the first to operate with supervised autonomy. It will incorporate technologies specifically developed by the Caranx Medical R&D team in fields such as artificial intelligence, imaging, robotics, and augmented reality.

i-Nov Innovation Competition

The i-Nov Innovation Competition is funded by the State through France 2030 and operated by Bpifrance in partnership with ADEME.

Since 2017, the competition has distinguished 624 laureates. It falls within the continuum of the “Innovation Competition” which is divided into three complementary components: i-PhD, i-Lab, and i-Nov.

The innovation competition marks a commitment from the State through funding, labeling, and enhanced communication to support the development of highly innovative and technological companies, eco-responsible and working towards a more sustainable society.

Upstream, the i-PhD and i-Lab competitions aim to encourage the emergence and creation of deep tech startups born from the advancements of cutting-edge French research. Downstream, the i-Nov competition supports the accelerated emergence of startups and SMEs with the potential to become global leaders in their field.

It selects, within a procedure favoring competition, innovation projects with particularly strong potential for the French economy and allows co-financing of research, development, and innovation projects, whose total costs range between 1 million and 5 million euros.