Per Vegard Nerseth
Chief Executive Officer
CEO of CMR Surgical, Per Vegard Nerseth, discusses CMR’s rapid growth and how the company is making robotic surgery more widely accessible to patients around the world.
CMR Surgical recently announced that that we have hit the significant commercial milestone of having over 100 systems installed worldwide. We are proud to have a growing base of Versius systems in four continents and believe milestones like this matter because this means we are tangibly delivering on our mission, helping many more patients receive minimal access surgery.
We firmly believe that, to successfully get patients access to better surgery, it is our job to do more than just sell and install a robot. It’s about opening up the surgical robotics market to hospitals that previously could not offer this extraordinary technology. We do this in a number of ways. For instance, it means offering flexible financing options to centres without access to upfront capital so they can adopt a system. It is also about having a small footprint and versatile system that can work in smaller operating rooms (ORs) and older hospitals, without the infrastructure to dedicate a whole OR to a robot. It also means focussing our commercial efforts not just on large, renowned teaching hospitals, but also small and mid-sized centres outside big cities which have high volumes of cases suitable for robotic-assisted surgery but often less access to innovation.
And once Versius is in the hospital, we must continue to work closely with the team to ensure they can utilise it as much as possible. To really deliver on our mission, our job doesn’t stop at the sale. It’s about helping these hospitals maximise their use of the system – whether one department uses it or its shared across a number of specialties. It is always fantastic to see a hospital add new teams to the list using Versius, such as the impressive teams at Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust in the UK, who are now using Versius across urology, colorectal, upper GI and gynaecology.
Continued growth in an underpenetrated market
CMR Surgical is proud to be the fastest growing surgical robotics company on the market, and the second largest in the soft tissue surgical robotics space. Since completing the world’s largest-ever private MedTech financing in 2021, we have made significant progress and I was pleased to reflect on our achievements since then and our ambitions for future growth at the Jefferies Healthcare Conference in London last week.
As I discussed at the conference, the surgical robotics market – currently valued at $6bn – is growing and remains significantly underpenetrated. This is particularly the case outside the US. Looking forward we strongly expect to see rapid growth and continued demand for Versius globally – as more health systems realise the real value of robotics in helping improve patient outcomes, while also increasing hospital capacity, cutting hospital waiting times, boosting recruitment, and reducing health inequalities. For these benefits to be fully realised, we need to ensure that a greater number of centres are able to access robotic technology, and this is a key part of the CMR strategy.
To continue to make progress on our ambitious plans, we will be going deeper into our current markets like Europe and Latin America, building on the strong foundations we have there, and growing out our teams to work with customers on the ground. However, we will also be looking to enter significant new markets, including the US and Japan, where we can offer significant differentiation with Versius – as the only small, modular and portable system on the market.
To ensure we can meet the expected strong global demand for Versius we are rapidly scaling up manufacturing and teams are close to moving into our new major manufacturing facility in Cambridgeshire, which will be the Company’s global exports hub. Having the extra space will allow us to accelerate hires in manufacturing to help us grow.
CMR Surgical is already a major player in the surgical robotics market – and this recent news underlines our rapid growth. We are ‘The Company’ disrupting the market and I am proud we are at the forefront of this innovative market and making minimal access surgery available to more people around the world.
