On any given day during the year, nearly 17,000 men, women and children across the globe will die from cancer. A devastating and painful disease, cancer has likely affected the life of a friend or family member.

Depending on the type of tumor, cancer is normally treated with radiation therapy, chemotherapy, surgery or a combination of these. Of these three treatment methods, radiation therapy is often the least traumatic to the patient and at the same time the most cost-efficient. Nearly 2/3 of the cancer patients alive today are candidates for radiation therapy.

Current technology, however, has a tremendous shortcoming limiting its effectiveness as a treatment: it cannot determine where the dose is actually going in a patient’s body when the radiation beam is on.

The human body inherently and inevitably has internal organ motion that causes the tumor to be in different positions when treatment occurs. This movement is often significant enough to cause the radiation to miss the intended target and healthy tissue can be repeatedly and unnecessarily irradiated, leading to more side effects and fewer cures. Radiation oncologists currently lack the tools to solve this problem. Despite the fact that today’s image-guided radiation therapy (IGRT) systems can generate a field of radiation with high precision to a non-moving target, they cannot ensure that the treatment is accurately delivered in the presence of organ motion. In essence, all available forms of state-of-the-art radiotherapy systems, including intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT), tomotherapy, proton and heavy–ion therapy, suffer from this limitation of precision without accuracy.

ViewRay’s MRI-based technology solves this problem, providing both precision and accuracy by acquiring a stream of dynamic images during the actual treatment while the beam is on. Our unique approach promises to revolutionize the efficacy and efficiency of radiation therapy. It will give the physician the knowledge of the actual dose delivered to the patient and the ability to ensure that the tumor receives its full prescription. The same information may enable the treatment of tumors previously thought too difficult to treat. Ultimately, we hope this advance will lead to increased cure rates and decreased side effects.