ONCOLOGY
3
What are Advanced Oncotherapy’s priorities for the year ahead? There are huge opportunities to upgrade the LIGHT system to make it smaller, cheaper and with better medical features, but our priority at this stage is to finalise and complete the project. As we complete the verification and validation process, we will also be looking at broadening our commercial relationships with a number of hospitals and universities. Also, we will continue to spread the word that proton therapy doesn’t have to be reserved for a few ‘elite’ patients; it can be democratised and made much more widely available. This is only possible with a new type of technology and a new accelerator. Such treatment should be for everyone.
Obviously, a project such as LIGHT is very costly. What is your vision for Advanced Oncotherapy’s future financing? Setting up a proton therapy centre is expensive, not just in terms of the acquisition of the system itself, which forms a relatively small fraction of the overall cost, but also the cost of setting up the entire clinical site. Such expenditure can be a barrier to smaller hospitals and clinics, but our vision is to make setting up a proton therapy centre much more affordable and, by implication, reduce the cost per treatment. In order to achieve this, city-centre healthcare centres need to be provided with a range of financing solutions, thereby avoiding the need for significant
upfront investment from customers. At the same time, this allows Advanced Oncotherapy to accelerate production, to address more quickly the large unmet need and to create significant cost savings through economies of scale. If we achieve this, then we can really democratise proton therapy. It is an absurd situation that, given all the benefits of proton therapy, there are currently only 90 centres worldwide that offer it, with approximately 230 treatment rooms. Globally, there is a need for more than 10,000 treatment rooms, so, to bridge that gap, it is important to have not only the latest technology, but also the right financing tools and strategies for our customers.
85