Zehra Karakılıç
Tilburg University
Netherlands (51.5° N, 5.0° E)

featuring Julie Walker, Navigation Engineer, Intuitive, Sunnyvale (37.3° N, 122.0° W)

Ecem Uluegeci
Harvard College
Boston (42.3° N, 71.0° W)

featuring Matthew Sprinkel, Marketing Manager, PROCEPT BioRobotics, Redwood City (37.4° N, 122.2° W)

Recent innovations in medical device technologies have been changing the future of healthcare. I have been interested in this industry since I was in high school, which is why I was excited about speaking to Matt Sprinkel.

Matt Sprinkel is a marketing manager at PROCEPT BioRobotics, which is a privately held surgical robotics company in Redwood City, California. He graduated from Rice University in 2015 with a major in international relations and minor in biochemistry. Then, he received his master’s degree in translational medicine from the Department of Bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley in 2018. I had the opportunity to interview Matt, who is currently in California, while I was across the globe in Turkey. In the interview, we talked about his previous plans as a pre-med student in college, his career path in the medical device industry, and what keeps him motivated about his job.

Matt has been working at PROCEPT BioRobotics since 2015, but he originally became interested in medical devices early on during an internship at a start-up company. This led him to alter his original plans in college for becoming a surgeon and instead pursue a career in medical devices, starting with his first role in the clinical research department. He was so fascinated by the current project of an autonomous tissue removal robot that he ended up more involved with quality assurance and research and development. This involvement led him to come up with an idea of a surgical drape, a project he took from concept development to prototype and manufacturing.

During his master’s program, Matt decided to navigate toward marketing even though he had not envisioned himself as a marketing manager in this company early on. As a marketing manager, he benefits from his multidisciplinary background, especially the clinical and medical expertise that helps him understand his product well. Matt also said that his political science degree has been helpful in his success as a marketing manager since some of his main tasks are simplifying the terminology and communicating the message clearly to the market.

The opportunity for continual learning and the exponential impact medical devices have on patients’ lives are great motivations for him and why he enjoys working in the medical device industry. The field is “very dynamic,” which encourages him to learn and grow. He is also grateful for the learning environment at PROCEPT BioRobotics, where he is surrounded by experienced mentors. He said, “It is great to be part of a team that’s on a mission of trying to do something greater than personal achievement and knowing that I’m making a difference.”

Matt’s career journey resonted with me. Many people have mistaken my passion for biology and healthcare as an interest to attend medical school. But, as Matt’s experience proves, however, one does not have to have a medical degree to work and make an impact in the healthcare field.  Matt recommended that new graduates interested in the medical devices industry lead by example, take pride in their work, and put themselves in a position where they will continue learning new skills.

Highlights from the interview:

What shaped your decisions into choosing your career?

I boldly stated in my high school resume objective statement I wanted to work at the intersection between medicine, business, and technology. I always thought this meant I would need to go to medical school. My mother was a doctor, and growing up I always wanted to learn more about what she did all day. In high school, I really enjoyed my science classes, which further cemented my path towards healthcare. I applied to internships, I shadowed, and by the time I graduated high school, I knew that I wanted to be pre-med. In college, I majored in political science/international relations and minored in biochemistry for my pre-med requirements. Then, one summer I took an unpaid internship at a small pre-clinical stage medical device startup and discovered that the medical device industry aligned more with my interests. This ultimately influenced my decision to take an unpaid internship at another medical device startup after graduating college. Those three months passed by in a blur and at the end of it I accepted their offer – I knew I’d found my path.  

What led you to your current position? What does this position entail? 

The route I took to my current role as a marketing manager was very circuitous. I started out in the clinical research department and assisted with our Phase II clinical trials. Over time, I wanted to learn more about our technology.. PROCEPT BioRobotics manufactures a robotic surgical device that can autonomously remove tissue, specifically forbenign prostatic hyperplasia. The disposable portion of the device is inserted [into the body], and the surgeon creates a customized treatment plan, essentially on a computer screen. Once complete, the surgeon presses on a footswitch, and the robot will autonomously remove the tissue according to the plan. I was completely enthralled by this, and I ended up helping the engineers in the research and development (R&D) laboratory. At first, I helped out with quality assurance testing, but then I became more comfortable with the device and traveled with our clinical research team for our phase two and phase three studies. Over time, I started to help build the device onsite, test it, and make sure it was ready for procedures. I also came up with a small idea for a surgical drape, which was a novel drape that improved the ergonomics and usability of our device during the procedure. That’s how I learned about design controls and R&D project management because I was the main person doing all of that. I took the project from idea stage to prototype patent to manufacturing, and finally, to FDA clearance through the 510K pathway. After I completed the project, PROCEPT offered me an opportunity to train surgeons on how to do the procedure for our commercial launch. I traveled all around the world the first three years of my career and spent 18 months in Europe training surgeons how to perform our procedure. Then, I came back and completed a master’s degree in translational medicine at UC Berkeley. After my master’s, I was thrilled to have PROCEPT offer me a very multidisciplinary role as a marketing manager. In this role I’ve worked with a lot of different departments: regulatory, quality, sales, and professional education. Because I had already jumped around in a couple of different roles and departments I had already started to develop the ability to look at problems and projects from multiple perspectives, which helped me acclimate to the new role.  

Did you ever envision yourself as a marketing manager?

When I first started at PROCEPT, I didn’t have that much of a plan. I was the 17th person in the building. At that point, there was so much work to be done and not enough people to do it. I just started taking on more work, and I didn’t have time to take a step back and think about the direction that I wanted to go until a couple of years in. Over time though, as I gained more experience and jumped to different roles, I started to gravitate towards marketing. I’ve found that navigating career paths in industry are very different from following the medical school path where you can almost project out what you’ll be doing for the next decade. Things get even more complicated in smaller, early-stage companies, because things change very fast. Every three to six months, the needs of the business change and new opportunities open up.  

It wasn’t until I was about two years into my career that I knew I wanted to work in marketing. I began to see how involved marketing was in every aspect of the business, and I liked the idea of being able to lead projects that involved so many different departments, while at the same time trying to figure out how to best communicate to surgeons the unique value of our product.

What are the skills you find yourself utilizing the most in your position now? How did your college years prepare you for that?

There are two skills I find myself using quite often. First, in marketing, it’s important to be able to distill something that is complicated into something that is simple and memorable. You can have a list of 50 features, but those features need to be turned into benefits that will actually resonate with surgeons (your customers).  Building on this example, your messaging should resonate not only with surgeons, but also with patients, hospitals, and insurance companies. As I mentioned before, my political science degree helped me to communicate clearly with all these stakeholders. The second skill I find myself using often is analysis and critical thinking. It’s hard to make decisions without information. It’s even harder to make decisions with information that doesn’t make any sense. I spend a lot of my time analyzing different metrics and looking at how our marketing programs are performing, because I can then figure out which programs work (and why), and which ones aren’t performing as well as they should be (and why).  

What keeps you motivated about your work?

If I had the choice today between working in the medical device industry and being a surgeon, I would still pick the medical devices industry. Not to sound cliché, but I’ve always wanted to make a difference. But more than that, I’ve always wanted to make a big difference. Working in medical devices has taught me an important lesson about scale. One medical device can improve tens of thousands of patients’ lives. It’s tougher to do that as a single surgeon in a practice. Another source of motivation is a sense of responsibility to not squander the great mentorship and advice I’ve received over the years. I’m very lucky to be able to learn from the experienced people at PROCEPT that have been willing to trust me by putting me in positions in which I might fail. I find it rewarding to conquer that initial fear of failure as I tackle a project or problem that I’m unsure if I’ll be able to complete or solve. I owe a great deal of my success to the people who have been there to help me and teach me. And lastly, it is great to be part of a team that’s on a mission to try and accomplish something we all wouldn’t be able to do as individuals.

What advice would you give a student interested in your field?

I have three pieces of advice. The first isn’t specific to the healthcare field and it’s to judge your work as if you were your manager. If you were the manager, would you like whatever output was just submitted to you? When I ask myself this question, it helps me anticipate things I may not have thought about, and make edits or additions that I otherwise would’ve missed.

The second piece of advice, which is a bit more relevant to the healthcare field is to never forget that patients’ lives are on the line. Whether you work in the Quality department or the Professional Education department, patients’ lives are impacted by your work. Whenever I find myself unmotivated to do the boring administrative work, I try to remind myself of this fact. It helps me stave off procrastination and continue to do good work, when it would otherwise be easy to let it slide.

Lastly, it’s important to ask for what you want in your career. What I mean by this piece of advice is that in order to even be able to ask, you have to put in the time to figure out what you want out of your career and why you want it. You can apply these questions to the short term (ie. to your current role), as well as to your long-term goals (ie. your dream job or goal). Once you have figured out where you want to go, be it a different role within your company or even changing industries, it makes it easier for other people to help you get there.

Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee. This article only aims to share personal opinions and learnings and does not constitute the interviewee’s current or former employer(s)’ position on any of the topics discussed.

by Hallie Trial, a sophomore majoring in chemistry at Rice University, Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

Physicist Richard Feynman once quipped, “it would be interesting in surgery if you could swallow the surgeon.” It sounds like science fiction, but with advances in medical robotics, it may become reality within the next few decades. While microrobots like those envisioned by Feynman have not yet emerged in mainstream healthcare, researchers have begun to build and study these tiny machines.

Robots already have many applications in healthcare, including performing ancillary tasks like fetching linens and lab results, assisting with surgery, replacing missing limbs or augmenting existing ones, and facilitating long-distance medicine. Many of the robots in the medical workforce currently conduct simple routine maintenance and caretaking tasks. In several US hospitals, robotic carts transport meals, bedding, medicine, and lab results around the building. Bestic, a robotic arm that users can control with their knees, feet, chins, or other body parts empowers patients with impaired arm or hand movements to eat meals on their own.

Other robots work under much more precise, demanding conditions. Surgical robots like the da Vinci surgical system and ZEUS Robotic Surgical System assist human surgeons at numerous US hospitals in performing minimally invasive surgeries and can even allow doctors to perform operations on patients thousands of miles away. These systems have tiny surgical arms with cameras that can fit through small slits in a patient’s skin, unlike the larger openings that are often necessary in a fully human-conducted surgery. The surgeon sits in front of a magnified 3D image of the inside of the patient’s body and manipulates the controls just as if she were performing the surgery herself; the robotic instrument copies her movements inside the actual patient. The robotic surgical arms can operate with even greater accuracy than human hands because they detect and do not copy hand tremors. The surgeon can also instruct the machine to move, for example, one inch for every three inches she moves, allowing for incredibly tiny motions and precise tissue manipulation.

These surgical tools, while useful in telesurgery, find use more often in on-site minimally invasive surgeries. Researchers have engineered other robots specifically to facilitate telemedicine. Remote Presence Virtual + Independent Telemedicine Assistant (RP-VITA), for instance, is a robot of approximately human height with a screen where its “head” would be. It shows a live video feed of a doctor on its screen and can navigate independently around rooms. This allows doctors to serve patients across the country or globe from their laptops or tablets in a way that feels more natural to the patient than talking to a disembodied screen. Telemedicine helps connect medical specialists and experts concentrated in certain parts of the country to underserved, often rural, communities.

Besides assisting with treatment, sometimes robots can serve as treatment. Robotic limbs have restored mobility to many individuals with birth defects and amputations. Scientists have constructed limbs that respond to impulses from severed nerves or even directly to signals from a patient’s motor cortex so that the patient can control the robotic replacement just like a natural limb. Robotic “exoskeletons” that wrap around existing limbs can also enable individuals with paralysis or other motor disorders to stand up and walk away from their wheelchairs—to move their own bodies again. Physical therapists can employ assistive exoskeletons as part of programs that help train people to move under their own power again.

Perhaps the most thrilling advancement in medical robotics is the field of microrobotics. Someday, these machines may perform surgeries from the inside without any external incisions. Researchers at MIT constructed an elegantly simple, biocompatible device from a piece of magnet attached to a film made from pig intestinal tissue. In a simulated silicon digestive system, the scientists were able to guide the robot into the stomach using magnets and have it remove a battery from the stomach lining. Numerous research groups have taken different engineering approaches to the same problem, building everything from hydrogel “origami” robots to cyborg sperm cells with nanotube helmets full of medication.

Given the incredible strides that the field of medical robotics has already made, it is easy to imagine a future world in which machines revolutionize medical care much the way they have revolutionized manufacturing, making it better and cheaper. There are, however, substantial barriers to such a future. Right now, medical robots tend to be prohibitively expensive; only the largest hospitals with the most resources can afford to invest in such mechanical solutions. It also takes time and training to teach doctors how to use medical robots like the da Vinci surgical system. Public policy has yet to catch up with rapidly-evolving technical innovations. For example, although telemedicine has become technologically possible, doctors still receive licensing by individual states, which can inhibit their ability to treat patients in other parts of the nation. While microrobots controlled by external magnetic field have incredible applications, the full realization of microrobotics’ potential will not occur until scientists develop self-navigating microdevices. In an interview for Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Sylvain Martel of Polytechnique Montréal in Canada pointed out, “You can’t control the robot because you cannot see the road.”

Innovators in a wide variety of fields will need to address these problems so that robotics can continue to change healthcare for the better. Researchers in both academia and industry with backgrounds in disciplines like mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, bioengineering, materials science, computer science, and physics will need to engineer cheaper, more effective, and more broadly applicable devices. These researchers will need to collaborate with forward-thinking medical doctors, surgeons, and hospital administrators to ensure that these devices are practical for healthcare settings. Government and public policy officials will have to adapt the law to evolving technological realities and carefully consider the outcomes and ethics of changes in medical robotics. These interdisciplinary innovators of our generation will push medical care into the future to the benefit of us all.

Further reading:

Providing a summary of robotics in healthcare, this serves as a good introduction to the subject: https://www.rn.com/nursing-news/robots-in-healthcare-whats-in-store-for-the-future/

The following is an article from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences describing recent breakthroughs in microrobotics: https://www.pnas.org/content/114/47/12356.

This source describes a telemedicine robotic system for caretaking of the elderly: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/19/4/834/htm.

This article from MedTech Boston discusses RP-VITA in more detail: https://medtechboston.medstro.com/blog/2014/08/26/rp-vita-robot-extends-specialized-medical-care/.

The following webpage provides further information about robotically assisted surgery: https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/robotic-surgery/about/pac-20394974.

Longitude.site welcomes students who are interested to explore other topics related to robotics, healthcare, or telemedicine as a Longitude fellow or a Longitude contributor.  Apply here.