Invivo Medica
Advancing Practices In Percutaneous Access

The COVID-19 outbreak showcased the significance of MedTech solution providers to the world, highlighting the quintessential role played by institutions of higher learning, hospitals, caregiving organizations, and healthcare practitioners, alongside research and developmental organizations. Asia’s medical technology (MedTech) sector was predicted to hit US$133 billion even before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, only rising to greater prominence in the post-pandemic world, nurturing over 60 multinational medical technology companies from global leaders to start-ups.

Among these pioneers, Invivo Medical is a MedTech start-up set up in Singapore, capitalizing on the investment, innovation, and commercialization opportunities of novel medical technologies and devices. The company’s vision and mission are to be a leading investor and provider of innovative and quality medical technologies and devices, supporting effective and affordable medical care to surgeons and patients worldwide. Invivo Medical’s efforts in advancing the percutaneous access technique with broad applications in interventional radiology, minimally-invasive surgery, and diagnostic biopsy are indeed noteworthy in the current day and age.

In conversation with MedTech Outlook, Dr Joseph Chai—the CEO of Invivo Medical—talks about its innovative strides in promoting safe, efficient, and cost-effective treatments and minimally invasive procedures. By applying simple techniques and devices, the company has benefited both physicians and patients alike.

Please elaborate on Invivo Medical’s value proposition in advancing precision surgery and the fundamental approach Invivo Medical has adopted in this process?

In the MedTech landscape, developing State-of-the-art medical technology and devices is the key to modern minimally invasive surgical procedures and biopsies, demanding safe, precise, and reliable solutions. Invivo Medical is positioned to improve the safety, efficacy, and practicality of minimally invasive surgeries and biopsies.

The magic of MedTech occurs when doctors, engineers, and even regulatory experts can be brought together to collaborate and embrace open innovation. We have collaborated closely with the National University Hospital (NUH), the National University of Singapore (NUS), and the Institute of Technical Education (ITE) to develop the PrecioUroGuide® (P●UG®) jointly. It is the world’s first non-active Class I/Class A sterile surgical device and procedure to assist urologists and intervention radiologists in precision fluoroscopy-guided percutaneous access to kidney stones for the Percutaneous Nephrolithotomy (PCNL) procedure.

Safe, effective, and affordable medical technologies can be brought to the market when the stakeholders across different disciplines successfully collaborate. I firmly believe our successes originated from our firm faith in open innovation, multi team work, eco collaboration, and win-win partnership.

In 2017, we acquired an exclusive technology license on the P●UG® from the National University Health System (NUHS) and Institute of Technical Education (ITE) consortium and have grown it with further innovations till what it is today.

Can you elaborate on your company’s differentiating factors and touch upon the advantages of Invivo’s innovative solutions?

The proprietary technology platform of Invivo Medical, Percutaneous Access Assist® (PAA®) Suite, comprises a portfolio of several licensed IP/ patents, invented for improving safety, accuracy, and efficiency of minimally invasive procedures and biopsies. The technologies in our PAA® Suite are designed to provide effective solutions that could be developed into reliable assistive technologies. They are crafted to enhance the safety and efficacy of percutaneous access with three key targets:

• achieving systematic functional precision
• effectively reducing the surgeon’s and patient’s exposure to radiation
• reducing procedure time

These technologies could be applied to percutaneous accesses to stones, lesions, and abscesses in deep organs guided by fluoroscopy, CT, and ultrasound procedures.

Key technology differentiations of our PAA® suite are its ability to:

The proprietary technology platform of Invivo Medical, Percutaneous Access Assist® (PAA®) Suite, comprises a portfolio of several licensed IP/patents, invented for improving safety, accuracy, and efficiency of minimally invasive procedures and biopsies

• Implement both passive and active solutions (class I/II (A/B) devices)
• Provide both notions of assistive and automated feedback control
• Support both Triangulation and Bull’s Eye methodologies.



The inventions in our PAA® Suite have been successfully applied and proven through the development and commercialization of P●UG®, a PCNL (Percutaneous Nephrolithotomy) needle targeting system for removing kidney stones.

Reflecting on a recent client interaction, could you share with us a before and after scenario of how you helped a particular client overcome a definitive hurdle? How does Invivo Medical translate its technology and knowledge pool into effective medical products beneficial to doctors and patients?

Using the PAA® Suite, Invivo Medical has developed three innovative products to support percutaneous access procedures: the Precio●UroGuide® (P●UG®) and C-Arm Trainer/Simulator (CATS®) systems to deliver accurate and efficient needle access.

Our P●UG® solves the challenge of needle puncture, which occurs when surgeons operate manually with hands exposed directly under imaging radiation, replacing this conventional technique with remote systematic and precision adjustment and alignment of needle supporting both the triangulation and bull’s eye techniques.

It gives surgeons complete options/ control over the procedures and significantly reduces the surgeons and patient’s exposure to radiation. This device has already received approval for use from the HSA, FDA, and CE bodies.

Clinical studies show that it could provide more accurate and effective puncture (enhances efficacy and safety of PCNL), reduce complication rate due to organ injury, shorten surgery time (improves efficiency and safety) from 5 to 30 mins down to 3 to 15 mins, reduce operation theatre cost, minimize radiation dosage and direct exposure (enhances safety) under X-ray for both surgeons and patients, and significantly shorten learning curve (improves the efficiency) of percutaneous access to allow young surgeons to master their specializations.

I am confident that the technology used and experiences learned in developing the PUG® can also be applied to procedures in interventional radiology and minimally invasive surgeries and biopsies to provide precision targeting for percutaneous access with much-reduced radiation exposure.



What is Invivo Medical’s key strategy on sustainable innovation in MedTech, and how does the company encourage a culture of innovation that aims to bring forth a global impact?

In the process of translating a MedTech innovation into a commercial product, be it designing or conceptualizing, iteration is common, and specialized/ deep medical knowledge is required. Further innovations are usually the result of joint efforts between a medical team and an engineering team, usually from an IHL or the industry. Such open and cross-disciplinary collaboration is natural and inherent to managing innovation in MedTech ventures. Open innovation in the MedTech industry allows ideas and solutions from both physicians and engineers to be integrated into practical innovation that is reliable, effective, and efficient for use.

With our first commercialization project licensed from ITE, NUH, and NUS, open innovation has been an essential part of Invivo Medical’s culture right from day one. We worked closely with several partners, taking the lead in operations, coordination, project management, and decision-making. We worked very closely with the medical team at NUH and NUS on urology practices and with the technology team from ITE’s Technology Development Centre on mechanical engineering and design. We also worked with our outsourced regulatory consultant to ensure that everything satisfied the regulatory standards and collaborated with many eco-industry partners in different specializations to identify the best technologies that would guarantee the innovation’s manufacturability.

To drive collaboration and sustain open innovation, Invivo Medical regards all parties involved in developing innovative ideas into usable products as treasured gems. We have been collaborating with many medical and business partners worldwide. We are currently reaching out to more partners with similar visions and expecting our family of global partners to grow exponentially in the next few years.

We have been inviting partners from different geographic regions such as medical specialists in the area of intervention radiology, diagnosis, minimally-invasive surgery, and biopsy; business stakeholders on joint investment, regional joint venture, technology licensing, global/regional distribution (pioneer distributors); and technologists including multi-disciplinary engineering teams from IHLs and R&D institutions in the area of medical robotics, machine vision, AI and expert system, and manufacturing, among other. Hence, we have an ambitious plan and schedule for our global expansion, coordinated with our synergized partners.