TIBARAY, INC. — Department of Health and Human Services SBIR Phase I: NCI

Description

PROJECT SUMMARY ABSTRACT The mission of TibaRay Inc is to develop and clinically translate next generation radiation therapy technologies for the treatment of cancer the single leading cause of death worldwide and increasing epidemically A major advance in radiation therapy RT that has increased its curative potential and decreased side effects is the ability to sculpt radiation doses exquisitely in D to conform to tumors and spare surrounding normal organs This dose sculpting is achieved by delivering radiation beams to the tumor from multiple directions each of which has an optimized spatial intensity distribution However the fastest treatment times are still minutes long limited by both beam intensities in electron linacs and the mechanical systems that are used to direct and shape the treatment beams To address these major shortcomings of current state of the art radiation delivery systems TibaRay is proposing a radical new design for RT systems Pluridirectional High energy Agile Scanning Electronic Radiotherapy PHASER based on patented novel technologies to produce intensity modulated therapeutic energy x ray beams from multiple directions using no mechanical systems to direct or shape the treatment beams This is achieved by using an array of novel electron linacs each of which uses a magnetic electron beam scanning scheme paired with an extended bremsstrahlung target and multi channel collimator array system referred to as Scanning Pencil array collimated High Speed Intensity modulated X ray source SPHINX The multiple linacs obviate the need to move a single linac on a gantry to achieve different beam directions and SPHINX eliminates the need for mechanical moving parts e g multi leaf collimators MLCs for therapy beam shaping Each of the novel linacs used in PHASER are far more efficient and will generate more beam than conventional medical linacs In the full PHASER design it is estimated that the treatment time can be reduced to less than one second effectively freezing physiological motion The novel accelerator technology uses much simpler manufacturing techniques and production costs for PHASER are projected to be about the same as current state of the art systems and maintenance downtime costs should be lower Initial proof of principle for the subsystems needed for PHASER have been demonstrated TibaRay in partnership with the Stanford University Department of Radiation Oncology and the SLAC National Acceleratory Laboratory proposes to design Phase I build and test and optimize a two beam PHASER prototype Phase II In Phase III TibaRay will develop the full PHASER prototype which will lead directly to commercialization and clinical translation Our novel technology will help fill a tremendous worldwide need for high quality cost effective radiation therapy for cancer PROJECT NARRATIVE The goal of the proposal is to design a two beam version of our Pluridirectional High energy Agile Scanning Electronic Radiotherapy PHASER concept to improve the accuracy precision speed and cost effectiveness of radiation therapy for cancer PHASER will enable the generation of high resolution intensity modulated radiation beams for rapid and exquisite D radiation dose sculpting through all electronic beam control replacing the current state of the art beam shaping through highly complex and failure prone mechanical devices PHASER enables treatment delivery fast enough to freeze the motion of moving tumors and will lead to more effective radiation treatments for cancer