For the past few months, neurosurgeons at hospitals in Florida, Connecticut and New York have been preparing for a wildly experimental operation designed to treat Alzheimer's disease, the dementia that leads to devastating memory loss. The surgery, which they've been practicing on cadavers, aims to clear the drainage pathways to the brain. This could help patients' own lymphatic systems flush out toxins that scientists believe are the hallmarks of the disease, which affects 7 million people in the U.S. alone.

To do so, they're turning to the smallest surgical robotic instruments in the world that can hold tiny needles the size of eyelashes, with scissors and dilators roughly the width of a human hair. The lymph vessels in the neck that surgeons would operate on for the Alzheimer’s procedure can be as little as 0.2 millimeters in diameter, the equivalent thickness of two sheets of paper. “It’s like taking a couple of strands of your hair and tying them together with little bitty sutures,” says Mark Toland, CEO of Jacksonville, Florida-based startup MMI, which makes the microrobots.

They aim to perform the first of these microrobotic surgeries on five people in March. While a very early-stage clinical study, it builds off reports from some 5,000 experimental surgeries performed in China and other Asian countries over the past five years that help the lymphatic system clear out build-up in the brain. They've shown remarkable, if largely anecdotal, results. Surgeons were not only able to slow the disease’s progression — they took patients with moderate Alzheimer’s back to a more mild stage of the disease, Toland says.

In November, MMI got the okay from the FDA to proceed with the trials, with the goal of first showing the procedure is safe in 15 people. If the initial trial is successful, Toland hopes to start enrolling 200 to 300 patients in a large-scale clinical trial later this year. With luck, he believes the startup could receive approval for the use of its microrobots to treat Alzheimer’s by the end of 2027.

"Nobody is going to adopt this procedure based on information coming out of China or even Korea." Mark Toland, MMI’s chief executive

"Nobody is going to adopt this procedure based on information coming out of China or even Korea."

It sounds pretty crazy. Once Alzheimer’s has progressed beyond its early stages, there is no known way to treat it, and attempts to do so have been abject failures. “As an investor if you say, ‘I’ve got a potential treatment for Alzheimer’s,’ the natural reaction is to say, ‘There’s no chance it’s going to work,’” says Dr. Andrew ElBardissi, an MMI investor and partner at Deerfield Management, which has more than $15 billion in assets invested in healthcare companies. “It........

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