In this week’s edition of InnovationRx, we look at the first human Alzheimer’s patients getting microrobotic surgery, Indian billionaire Dilip Shanghvi’s plans to expand his healthcare empire in the U.S., the hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship, and more. To get it in your inbox, subscribe here.

A clinical trial for the use of microrobots in treating Alzheimer’s disease kicked off with its first robotic-assisted procedure in human patients at Baptist Health in Jacksonville, Florida. The first patient, treated on Friday, had moderate Alzheimer’s disease–the dementia that leads to devastating memory loss and affects 7 million people in the U.S. alone–and confirmed abnormalities in their deep cervical lymph node region. Two additional patients with moderate Alzheimer’s underwent the procedure on Monday. Microrobot maker MMI (Medical Microinstruments Inc.) expects to ultimately enroll 15 patients and follow them for 12 months after their operations. The goal of the surgery is to clear drainage pathways to the patients’ brains, helping their own lymphatic systems flush the toxins that scientists believe are hallmarks of the disease.

Alzheimer’s has long confounded researchers, and efforts to develop treatments for it have resulted in a graveyard of failures, but fixing the brain’s “plumbing” with surgeries or drugs has attracted increased attention recently. This has left scientists viewing MMI’s wildly experimental operation (which Forbes profiled earlier this year) with a mix of skepticism and hope. While MMI’s studies are very early stage, they build off reports from some 5,000 experimental surgeries performed in China and other Asian countries over the past five years that have shown remarkable, if largely anecdotal, results.

MMI, which has raised $220 million from investors that include Fidelity, Deerfield Management and RA Capital at a valuation around $500 million, designed robots that use the smallest surgical instruments in the world that can hold tiny needles the size of eyelashes and scissors and dilators roughly the width of a human hair. That’s crucial because the lymph vessels in the neck that surgeons operate on can be as small as 0.2........

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