Somnus’ CEO Dr Tim Craft was recently in the USA speaking at theAnnual Conference of the Society for Technology in Anaesthesia (STA). We asked him to tell us about it.
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I flew into Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport at the beginning of the year and at least managed to escape the wall-to-wall grey that is a typical UK January for a few days. I jumped in a rather beaten-up Uber for the short trip downtown, long enough, though to tell the driver how delighted I was to start 2025 with a presentation of Somnus’ achievements and ambitions at the STA. Their mission is to improve the quality of patient care by innovation in the use of technology and its application. Although this year’s Conference was held in Arizona, attendees travelled far and wide and came from a clinical background or from the MedTech industry serving anaesthesia globally.
The meeting is generously supported by a variety of MedTech companies, and we were able to negotiate attendance at an invitation only session before the conference started. Here clinicians and industry representatives discussed current and future challenges in anaesthesia and sedation. Themes that emerged included personalised care (especially drug dosing), Anaesthesia delivered in a non-operating room setting (an area where there is demand for even more robust patient monitoring), and the implications of the FDA (Federal Drug Agency) granting US regulatory approval for propofol-based TIVA using TCI pumps (as is currently practised in the rest of the world).
Sessions during the conference covered topics such as brain signalling during anaesthesia, the state of wearable devices, and early results from a range of clinical trials. Somnus was included in a session titled Novel Monitors in the Perioperative Period.
In the Q&A that followed our presentation there was lively engagement from the floor which continued afterwards during the breaks. The audience agreed strongly that optimising sedation administration in the ICU using our technology would be a great step forward. Using ProSed® to facilitate timely and safe discharge after procedural sedation was also thought likely to yield clinical and operational benefits. As expected in the country where inhalational anaesthesia remains so dominant (in part due to the approach taken by the FDA), there was more discussion about how propofol monitoring fits in with TIVA. It was agreed that America would have to learn from the experience gained around the rest of the world in the first instance.
Presenting at the conference was especially beneficial for Somnus, as it led to a number of meetings with the sponsoring companies, many of whom wanted to explore potential commercial collaboration with us. There will be more to come on this!
Finally, I booked a taxi back to the airport. Nothing unusual in that you might think, but for me it was a first. The taxi was a fully autonomous (i.e. no driver whatsoever) Jaguar iPace run by a company called Waymo One. The cars are equipped with an array of cameras and sense and solve in real traffic situations continuously. The ride was smooth and faultless, passing stopped buses and avoiding parked cars with ease. It was a reminder of the willingness of Americans to develop and adopt innovation at pace and scale and served to emphasise why we are prioritising entry to the US market following launch in the UK.
