London Surgeon Performs UK's First Remote Robotic Surgery on a Cancer Patient 2,400 Kilometers Away in Gibraltar
Professor Prokar Dasgupta operated a robotic system from The London Clinic to remove a prostate in Gibraltar with only 60 milliseconds of latency, marking the UK's first telesurgery and Europe's longest-distance remote operation.
Overview
A surgeon sitting at a console in London has performed the United Kingdom’s first remote robotic surgery, removing the prostate of a cancer patient located more than 2,400 kilometers away in Gibraltar. The operation, carried out on March 4 by Professor Prokar Dasgupta of The London Clinic, used a fibre-optic link with a 5G backup to control a four-armed robotic system at St Bernard’s Hospital in Gibraltar, achieving a round-trip latency of just 60 milliseconds.
The procedure is being described as Europe’s longest-distance telesurgery operation and a milestone that could reshape how specialist surgical care reaches patients in remote or underserved regions.
What We Know
The surgery was a radical prostatectomy, the complete removal of the prostate gland, performed on an unnamed 52-year-old male patient. According to The Gibraltar Chronicle, the operation used the Toumai robotic surgical system manufactured by Shanghai-based MicroPort MedBot, a platform designed specifically for telesurgery applications. The robot features a 3D high-definition camera and four articulated arms, and was purchased by the Gibraltar Health Authority with donor support.
Professor Dasgupta, who leads The London Clinic’s Robotic Centre of Excellence, controlled the system from a surgical console in London while a local surgical team stood by at St Bernard’s Hospital as a safety measure, ready to assume manual control if the connection failed. The primary link ran over fibre optics, with a secondary 5G connection available as backup, as reported by British Brief.
The March 4 procedure was technically the second operation in the program. An earlier test case was performed on February 11 on Paul Buxton, a 62-year-old British expatriate living in Gibraltar who had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. According to The Gibraltar Chronicle, Buxton reported feeling “fantastic” just four days after his surgery and described the experience as seamless. The March 4 operation was designated the first “official” remote procedure.
Professor Dasgupta said the 60-millisecond latency made the experience feel “almost as if I was there,” according to British Brief. Gibraltar’s Health Minister Gemma Arias-Vasquez called the operation a “historic milestone.”
The technology provider Presidio supplied the networking infrastructure for the link between the two sites.
The Toumai System
The Toumai surgical robot has been at the center of a string of telesurgery firsts. According to MicroPort, the system completed the first intra-European Union telesurgery cases in May 2025, when surgeons in Melle, Belgium remotely operated on patients at a hospital in Aalst, achieving bidirectional latency of 20 milliseconds over a standard hospital network.
The platform has also been used for an FDA-approved intercontinental telesurgery between Orlando, Florida and Luanda, Angola, a distance of 17,000 kilometers. MicroPort says the system has completed more than 200 human telesurgery cases globally. Its CE certification allows commercial deployment across the European market.
What Comes Next
Professor Dasgupta is scheduled to perform another remote prostatectomy on March 14, this time live-streamed to approximately 20,000 urological surgeons attending the European Association of Urology congress, according to The Gibraltar Chronicle. The demonstration is intended to showcase the viability of long-distance robotic surgery to the broader surgical community.
According to Devdiscourse, the collaboration between The London Clinic and the Gibraltar Health Authority envisions expanding telesurgery applications beyond urology to gynecological, colorectal, and upper gastrointestinal procedures. Proponents argue the approach could eliminate the need for patients in remote territories to travel long distances for specialist operations, reducing costs and recovery disruption.
What We Don’t Know
The long-term reliability of telesurgery links over thousands of kilometers remains unproven at scale. While the 60-millisecond latency proved acceptable for prostatectomy, it is unclear whether the same margin would be safe for procedures requiring faster reflexes, such as cardiac or neurosurgery. The regulatory pathway for routine cross-border telesurgery in the UK and EU has not been established, and questions around liability, licensing, and data sovereignty for surgical telemetry crossing international borders remain open.
It is also not yet clear how the economics will work outside of a demonstration context. The cost of maintaining dedicated fibre-optic links with redundant 5G backup, combined with the need for a full on-site surgical team as a safety net, could limit the near-term cost advantages that proponents cite.