UW Health strikes deal with Leo Cancer Care for $60M upright proton cancer therapy technology

UW Health plans to offer proton therapy, a form of radiation treatment that more precisely targets tumors for patients with certain cancers, and will be the first location in the state of Wisconsin to provide the treatment.

The University of Wisconsin–Madison affiliated health system announced Tuesday it struck a partnership with medical device company Leo Cancer Care to be the first medical center in the world to use the company's new radiation device, which delivers proton therapy using groundbreaking upright treatment technology.

Proton treatment allows for the highest level of precision, which is particularly important for children and for adults with cancers near vital organs.

"Proton therapy is the most exquisitely accurate type of radiation delivery, like an artist painting with a fine brush to be able to just target the tumor and really limit the dose to the normal tissue," Paul Harari, M.D., chair of the Department of Human Oncology at UW School of Medicine and Public Health and a radiation oncologist at UW Health, told Fierce Healthcare.

"We have very state-of-the-art radiation treatment in existence here today. But there are so many levels of sophistication, and proton therapy sits at one end of that spectrum for patients that have tumors right up against a critical structure, touching the eye, touching the brain stem or spinal cord, touching the heart where we want to create a high gradient from the radiation to go to almost no dose to the normal structure nearby, and that's what proton can bring," Harari said.

rendering of Leo Cancer Care upright proton beam therapy device
The device enables patients to sit upright when receiving radiation therapy. (Leo Cancer Care)

The technology, called "Marie" in honor of radiotherapy pioneer and Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie, enables patients to receive radiation treatment while sitting upright instead of the usual way of lying flat on their backs.

There are several benefits to having patients sit upright as it's better for a patient's breathing and heart function but it's also a more comfortable and natural position for the body, Harari said.

Leo Cancer Care's device offers a more "human way" to deliver radiation therapy, according to Stephen Towe, CEO of Leo Cancer Care.

"The company was founded to bring better medicine and to try to the reduce, size, cost and complexity of current radiation therapy equipment," he said.

UW Health expects to start treating patients with the device in 2024, when construction on its new $438 million cancer treatment center is scheduled to be complete.

Proton therapy is more expensive than conventional radiation therapy. The treatment benefits most the estimated 20% of patients with tumors near sensitive tissue, for which proton therapy is typically approved by insurers. With UW Health treating about 180 cancer patients a day with radiation treatment, about 30 of those patients on any given day could benefit from proton therapy, Harari said.

Proton therapy is currently provided at 36 centers throughout the U.S., with the closest sites for Wisconsin residents being Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and Northwestern University near Chicago.

Monday, Froedtert Health together with the Medical College of Wisconsin near Milwaukee also announced plans for proton therapy, with both of the state’s competing academic health centers saying they will start the service in 2024, The Chippewa Herald reported.

Proton therapy centers are a pricey investment for health systems, averaging around $75 million. Historically, these devices required big construction projects as conventional proton beam therapy requires rotating hundreds of tons of steel, concrete and equipment around the patient to reach the necessary angle for treatment and deliver the radiation beams.

This approach can be both cost- and space-prohibitive for many health systems, Towe said.

Leo Cancer Care's model is much smaller than most and requires less space, so the cost is less than a typical proton therapy system. UW Health is paying around $60 million to install the device, Harari said.

While proton treatment is not new, UW Health’s unique and potentially game-changing approach revolves around how the beam is used—or, more precisely, how the patient is moved, he said.

With this upright treatment approach, the patient is in a more natural position sitting on a specially designed chair that moves the patient in front of a static proton beam. While this still requires a particle accelerator, it will not need to be rotated, breaking down many traditional barriers to proton treatment and making it an ideal long-term solution for health systems, according to Towe.

The device, Marie, rotates the patients, turning their bodies to the precise angle at which the radiation needs to be delivered to treat the person's cancer.

“If you need to change a lightbulb, you don’t hold the lightbulb and rotate the house. We’re applying that simple concept to modern radiation therapy,” Towe said.

When radiation therapy began in the 1950s, the medical field typically would lie patients on their backs for treatment because, at the time, diagnoses came later in the disease, which meant many patients were not very mobile and needed to lie flat for the treatment. Also, quality imaging in the upright orientation was not available at the time.

"That's why we went down this road of the supine patient and fixed radiation. But if you look at the way we're treating patients today, it's not the 1950s. The percentage of patients that are bed-bound when they receive therapy is very, very low. We now diagnose patients much earlier," Towe said. 

He added, "What we've seen is that the radiation therapy industry as a whole has not really innovated for a long time. We come to the market with something that looks so visibly different and with a value proposition as compelling as ours that brings better medicine at the same time that it brings better health economics."

Leo Cancer Care started as a research group out of the University of Sydney in Australia. The company is now based in Middleton, Wisconsin, with offices in Europe and North America.

The company's technology is in the process of gaining 510(k) approval and will not be used to treat patients until approval has been granted, according to executives.

Harari expects the use of Leo Cancer Care's upright treatment device could mark a "paradigm shift" in the field of radiation oncology and diagnostic radiology.

"It's significant for the patient experience and patient comfort and humanity but also there is a cost efficiency and space savings efficiency that is powerful in this setting," Harari said, "The ingenuity of the Leo Care upright solution is that it's a sophisticated chair that does all of the range of motion and enables the proton beam line to be static so it needs much less construction, space and shielding, so the cost of bringing forth proton beam centers in the future could be substantially reduced."