Safe and effective medical treatment is essential in cancer care. With radiation treatment, something more than half of people diagnosed with cancer require, the stakes are high. Radiation therapy uses specialized machines that shoot high-energy beams at a patient in order to destroy cancer cells. The beams are specifically calibrated to avoid healthy tissue and keep the patient safe. The treatment is time-consuming, with patients typically requiring treatment multiple times a week for a number of weeks.

In this process, the role of a medical physicist cannot be overstated. This niche position in the medical field requires a highly trained individual who performs specialized jobs, including planning the treatment for patients and many quality assurance tasks to make sure the device is calibrated correctly. These critical quality assurance functions can take hours to complete, and often factor into patient scheduling.

If the system doesn't sound overwhelming yet, there's also a widespread shortage of medical physicists. This shortage paired with the demanding quality assurance tasks play into the logistics of patient care. But what if there was a way to make this process more efficient?

"We're in a time right now with extreme pressures on cost containment in medicine. Medical physicists are a highly specialized niche profession, and there's a shortage of medical physicists nationwide and internationally. So taking these resources, the limited human resources, and being able to stretch them further is good for patient care because that reduces costs for clinics and reduces the cost of patient care," said Dr. Janelle Molloy, CEO and founder of Medical Physics Innovations.

Molloy is determined to make quality assurance tasks for those in the field easier and more efficient. She knows the field and the pain points well, as she has spent more than 30 years as a clinical academic medical physicist and most recently was the director of medical physics at the University of Kentucky Radiation Oncology department. Through Medical Physics Innovations, she is developing a single device that will integrate and automate many of the time-consuming quality assurance tasks that medical physicists do on a daily basis.

"In addition to allowing physicists to be more efficient and precise, (the device) also allows them to delegate some of the data collection to other people and really allow for remote medical physics services to be provided," she explained.

"The company is centered around our flagship device that we're calling the QA (Quality Assurance) Integrator, which is an overall device that integrates a whole bunch of other devices. But we are also taking our innovative patent-protected technology and developing a suite of similar products that are focused on other more specific tasks too."

Having the device available for clinics could make treatments more accessible for patients, especially in locations where employing a full-time medical physicist isn't possible.

"One of the primary things that medical physicists do is quality assurance for radiation therapy, and these are therapies for cancer patients," Dr. Molloy said. "I noticed that I and my staff spent a majority of our time just doing quality assurance procedures, particularly procedures that were on the treatment machines. These things are very time-consuming and have a lot of complicated equipment. So I became interested in trying to find a better solution so my staff didn't have to spend so much time just setting up equipment and tearing it down."

"This especially comes in handy in rural communities where access to treatment can be difficult for many patients," she added. "With the limited supply of medical physicists, not every clinic is going to be able to have one. Plus, many clinics may not need a medical physicist full-time. Opening up to the possibility of remote work gives clinics the opportunity to offer radiation services without bringing a medical physicist on staff, and opens up treatment options to areas that were underserved."

The Medical Physics Innovation's QA Integrator is designed so that the single device will be able to do all of the monthly quality assurance tasks that a medical physicist does. The device also allows a medical physicist to run the tasks remotely.

"One of the big problems that small clinics and underserved areas have is that they might need like 20 percent of a medical physicist, or 30 percent, and how do you hire 30 percent of our medical physicists to work in a remote location? It makes it really difficult," Dr. Molloy said.

"If they could do a lot of their work remotely, then that helps remove one of the barriers to clinics opening up in smaller rural areas. That allows patients to receive the radiation treatments locally—the radiation treatments are typically done every day over the course of a few weeks. For some patients, this is a hardship that causes them to actually not get the treatments that they need. So we're hoping to be able to increase access to radiation therapy treatments by automating this key process."

To move her idea and company forward, Dr. Molloy has worked with the University of Kentucky Office of Technology Commercialization and has completed Launch Blue's UAccel program and pre-seed accelerator. Medical Physics Innovations also recently received funding from a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) award, which will be used to develop a full-utility prototype of the device.

With the grant funding and the community support, the ball is rolling. The Medical Physics Innovations team continues to grow--but they are currently searching for a computer engineer and some administrative help. And they are eager to get a minimum viable product into clinics and into the hands of medical physicists, a goal they aim to have happen in the next couple of months. The next big hurdle they face is clearance by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration, a process that can take months or years.

"On the FDA, I think a lot of people roll their eyes and say, 'Oh, it's going to be so much work,'" Dr. Molloy said. "That might be true but I'm actually embracing that for two reasons: One is that they will pretty much prescribe our design control and review our processes, so I'm glad there's a framework for making sure that we're doing what we need to do in order to keep patients safe. The other thing is that when we approach customers about buying this, one of the first things they ask is 'Is it FDA cleared?' And if it's FDA cleared, then there's a lot of extra comfort level that potential customers can have with it."

As her team moves full steam ahead, Dr. Molloy's colleagues in the industry have given her the feedback that this device could be a real game-changer for cancer care.

"Some of them say, 'Oh, it sounds too good to be true.' A couple of them said, 'When can I buy five?'" she said. "Assuming we can get it to work the way we think it can work, there's a lot of potential excitement in the field over it."

By: Erin Shea

Launch Blue nurtures promising startup founders and university innovators through intensive accelerator and incubator programs. Its funding partners are the University of Kentucky: Office of Technology Commercialization, KY Innovation, the U.S. Economic Development Administration, and the National Science Foundation.