Robust, Efficient Medical Linear Accelerator System—RadiaBeam
Systems, Santa Monica, California, 1713 Stewart Street, Santa Monica, CA
90404-4021
Salime
Boucher, Principal Investigator, boucher@radiabeam.com
Salime
Boucher, Business Official, boucher@radiabeam.com
Amount: $149,791
Research Institution
Universtiy
of Southern California Los Angeles
Radiation
therapy is used to treat over 60% of cancer patients and is used in nearly half
of the curative cases, however, in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC),
there is a large underserved population, with technology per capita 2 or more
orders of magnitude lower than in the US. Many LMIC still utilize outdated
Cobalt-60 machines, which result in excessive normal tissue dose, present
safety hazards, and are at risk for diversion for terrorist purposes in
radiological dispersal devices (aka “dirty bombs”). The barriers to wider
adoption of modern linear accelerator technology are primarily due to the high
capital and operating costs and requirement for highly- trained personnel. In
addition, state-of-the-art medical linacs have very high peak and average
electrical draws, and require stable, reliable power that is often unavailable
in LMIC. This project will address these issues with a novel medical linac
platform that will be designed from the ground up to be robust, reliable and
efficient. The system is based on the novel 4π radiotherapy technique developed
at UCLA. It utilizes an industrial robot and allows automatic generation and
delivery of high-quality treatment plans. A reliable sparse orthogonal
collimator will replace the failure-prone multileaf collimator. Finally, it
will incorporate a linear accelerator and RF power system design that is
optimized for power efficiency and low cooling requirements. In Phase I of the
SBIR project, the efficient accelerating structure and RF power system will be
designed and optimized to minimize power consumption and cooling requirements.
The simplified, yet clinically superior, sparse orthogonal collimator will be
engineered. Finally, the automated treatment planning software will be
developed. There is a compelling humanitarian and economic case for increasing
access to radiotherapy. Millions die every year in the developing world from
cancers that could have been successfully treated by radiation therapy, and it
is estimated that the return on investment in radiotherapy can exceed $500
billion globally in 2015-2035 and save 27 million life-years. The team behind
this proposal has already started the process of raising private capital for
the development of this novel, simple, yet clinically superior radiotherapy
system. The business plan projects $674 million in sales during the first 10
years of commercialization. The global radiotherapy equipment market was $4.9
billion in 2014.
This project will develop a simplified, efficient,
highly-automated medical linear accelerator system to address the problem of
limited access to modern radiotherapy equipment in low-income and middle-income
countries.