Med Tech Talks Ep.82: Michele Marzola Pt. 1

How It’s Med

Taking a robot from a spaceship🚀 and employing it in a surgery🏥

Welcome to this week’s episode of Med Tech Talks. This time, we chat with Michele Marzola, an engineer, an MBA, an ex-consultant, and now a life-sciences investor. Michele is a co-founder of XSurgical Robotics, a company that specializes in building robots for surgery.

Geoff and Michele talk at length about Michele’s early days at IBM, his foray into investment and how this concept of democratized surgical robotics developed from inception to where it is today.

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Timestamps

01:00-02:36 - The motivation to become a life-sciences investor.

03:02-06:58 - A lifelong multitasker, Michele talks about his early days in consulting, and how life-science investing happened.

07:00-09:15 - Bringing into life sciences his experience from previous roles as a consultant, and how the two differ in practice.

09:16-11:43 - Michele’s most memorable projects at IBM.

11:44-14:18 - Working with scientific professionals for the first time.

14:19-18:17 - The inception of XSurgical Robotics; how a NASA mission inspired Michele to build robots for surgery.

18:18-22:45 - Michele stresses on the need for democratization of surgical robotics.

22:48-25:34 - Using AI to reduce the time-lag for surgeries happening concurrently on two different continents.

25:35-29:44 - Making the choice to have their platform open to all: does it pose a risk to profitability?