Hospices Civils de Lyon (HCL; Lyon, France) has acquired Epione, the robotic platform developed by Quantum Surgical (QS) that is designed to enable minimally invasive ablations of tumours in the abdomen. This was announced by QS in a press release.
This partnership between HCL and QS will allow more patients to benefit from Epione, a platform allowing clinicians to plan, target, deliver and confirm ablation treatment in a more secure and precise manner. Epione is currently used to target liver and kidney tumours but will be expanded to the treatment of lungs and bones as radiologists at HCL expand their robotic interventional oncology practice.
HCL is the second hospital in the world to offer this platform. The first Epione robot was acquired by Institut Gustave Roussy (Villejuif, France) in January 2022 and the team is approaching their 100th robotic procedure.
“This new acquisition of Epione is a major step for QS and a full validation of the key benefits that Epione offers. It is a great honour to have our robotic system acquired by one of the top medical institutions in France. The most exciting part of this story is that patients will now have a powerful new technology that can offer curative treatments by robotically navigating to destroy tumours while sparing surrounding healthy tissue,” explains Bertin Nahum, QS chief executive officer.
“Epione is a unique percutaneous robotic solution […] Currently, only few expert radiologists perform these treatments. Robotics will allow us to standardise these treatments and more radiologists will thus be able to perform these cases, especially the more complex ones, on tumours that would not be treated. This will allow us to help and cure more patients,” underlines Laurent Milot, deputy head of medical and interventional imaging department at HCL.
