Dr. Alexander Kutikov (center) with Insight Medbotics' Chief Product Officer Akshay Puli (left) and Chief Technology Officer Abhijit Saxena (right).
While designing Glenn™, our next-generation robotics platform,* we’ve listened closely to urologists across the United States about the recurring challenges within their practices.
Across our team’s conversations with more than 70 practitioners working in a variety of clinical contexts, one theme is consistent:
Urologists want greater precision to resolve their existing visualization challenges in delivering prostate cancer care. Currently, the tools in daily practice force approximation when treating cancerous lesions within the prostate, which limits them to a ‘one-size-fits all’ treatment.
That tension became especially clear to us when Dr. Alexander Kutikov, Chair of the Department of Urology at Fox Chase Cancer Center, met Glenn, our next-generation robotics platform designed for precision in prostate cancer care.
As a surgical specialist who treats tumors of the adrenal, kidney, prostate, bladder, testis, and other genitourinary organs, Dr. Kutikov ensures his prostate cancer patients are aware of all the choices available to them.
Focal therapy is one such treatment that holds enormous promise: treat the cancer, preserve the prostate, and reduce life-altering side effects. Yet today, only a small subset of patients qualify.
The constraint doesn’t stem from a lack of interest in using focal therapy—it’s a lack of confidence.
Unpacking the Bottleneck in Focal Therapy
To safely offer focal therapy, urologists must be confident that the cancer is limited to a dominant lesion and that the rest of the prostate is clear. Yet, with today’s biopsy workflows, that certainty is often compromised.
Here’s what happens now:
- During the biopsy, the urologist takes tissue samples from the suspected dominant lesion and surrounding prostate. A positive result from the former and a negative result from the latter qualifies patients for focal treatment.
- In reality, the precision gap surrounding visualization accuracy means urologists are unsure exactly where in the prostate the samples are taken. If a sample from the surrounding prostate comes back positive, it may mean that cancer is present elsewhere or that the sample is displaying a false positive.
- Without a clear, unambiguous result, the patient will not qualify for focal therapy.
In our conversations, Dr. Kutikov explained that ambiguity effectively contaminates the biopsy results, disqualifying patients who might otherwise benefit from focal therapy. Urologists need better visualization and more precise biopsy tools to establish a lesion’s boundaries, ensuring they treat only cancerous tissue.
The result for patients today?
A make-do compromise that translates to more biopsy cores, more guesswork, and fewer patients who are eligible for precision treatments.
Why Glenn’s Real MRI Guidance Changes the Prostate Care Paradigm
Glenn fundamentally changes this workflow, not by adding complexity, but by closing what we call the Precision Care Loop. By bringing real MRI guidance directly into urologic practice, Glenn allows physicians to see exactly where they are, where they’ve been, and where they’re going—across diagnosis and treatment.
That power comes from continuity. Glenn links the three steps that are typically siloed in current practice:
- Diagnosis – MRI-visible lesions are imaged and targeted directly for biopsy, not approximated through fusion.
- Mapping – Every biopsy core is spatially recorded with exact coordinates inside the prostate.
- Pathology and Therapy – Cancer diagnosis results for each biopsy core are mapped to the location where they were obtained from the prostate. With that specific map, those same coordinates can guide focal treatment, ensuring energy is delivered precisely where cancer was confirmed.
“Glenn replaces the guesswork involved in treating cancerous lesions with certainty,” says Akshay Puli, chief product officer for Insight Medbotics. “Glenn isn't just a robot—it’s a platform that unifies siloed data onto a MRI scan that urologists already know and trust. This transformational leap turns a fragmented clinical journey into an integrated prostate cancer care pathway.”
Taking that longitudinal precision into the MRI means giving urologists the real MRI guidance that they need to accurately identify cancer margins, qualify more appropriate patients for focal therapy, and treat cancerous lesions with confidence—all while sparing healthy tissue.
How patients would benefit from closing the precision gap
When Dr. Kutikov saw Glenn, he immediately saw the value in changing current practice through greater visual precision:
“The robot knows exactly where in the prostate the biopsies were taken from. So if and when focal therapy is delivered, it’s directed precisely at the sites of cancer. That’s incredibly powerful.”
In short, Glenn doesn’t just improve biopsy accuracy. It creates a continuous pathway of precision from diagnosis to therapy.
For patients, this level of precision can mean fewer missed cancers, less overtreatment, and reduced risk of long-term side effects.
That’s the kind of transformational care every prostate cancer patient deserves.
* Insight Medbotics’ robotics platform is FDA cleared for breast biopsy. Glenn™ is under development and is not FDA cleared for prostate indication in the US or available for sale.
