Innovation

RaySearch’s foundational ambition is to continuously improve cancer care, which means that a strong focus on innovation is only natural. About half of the company’s employees work with R&D and over the past five years, over 34 percent of net sales, on average, has been re-invested in R&D. This is believed to be the highest figure in the industry.

The focus on innovation should also be seen in light of the fast pace of innovation in the medical technology industry and the fact that RaySearch’s competitive position requires a continuous lead in this development. The company’s core product, RayStation, predominantly competes with the treatment planning systems that the major manufacturers, Varian and Elekta, offer as part of a package solution with their radiation therapy machines. At present, RayStation offers significant efficiency gains compared with its competitors and maintaining this lead is vital for the company’s long-term success.

INNOVATIVE THINKING To achieve this goal, RaySearch strives to maintain a culture characterized by innovative thinking, where the focus lies on quality, a long-term approach, customer needs and commercial products, while employees are encouraged to pursue unconventional ideas. The culture is reflected in an organization where nearly all managers are also innovators, in the sense that they are experts in their respective fields, and make concrete contributions to the innovation processes.

To maintain this pace of innovation over time, recruiting people with both the right skills and a desire to develop is essential. Therefore, RaySearch primarily employs new graduates who are trained and developed in house. Many of the people who are now the company’s leading experts came into the company along that path. The RaySearch Academy provides ambitious induction programs for small groups of new employees.

Innovation and development is pursued in close collaboration with leading cancer clinics and research institutes, including the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Canada, uMCG in the Netherlands, heidelberg university hospital in Germany, and Massachusetts General hospital and the MD Anderson Cancer Center in the uS. These close and long-term relationships are very important for understanding and meeting customer needs. Employees from the R&D departments participate continuously in dialog with the clinics. RaySearch also has strategic partnerships with a number of medical device suppliers including IBA, Accuray, Mevion. MAJOR PROGRESS IN 2021 In 2021, development activities resulted in the release of new and significantly improved versions of all four products. for RayStation, the new features included improved dose calculation accuracy on daily images for photon therapy. In addition, opportunities for planning and evaluation of treatments where external radiation therapy is combined with brachytherapy were enhanced. The possibility of using linear energy transfer (LET) to provide information about the biological effect of the radiation in the body was also released. The latest version of RayStation is also more integrated with RayCare and RayCommand, making clinical workflows even smoother. for RayCare, the most significant improvement was that the clinics can now configure their workflows and tailor them to their specific needs, which previously required assistance from RaySearch. In RayIntelligence, improvements included enhanced functionality for the analysis and comparison of treatment plans for patient populations.

The large number of new features that were added in 2021 is indicative of the fact that innovation, on the whole, was able to continue unabated, despite the restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. While remote work was successful, we still believe that face-to-face interactions are important for long-term innovation. These range from formal brainstorming sessions to spontaneous conversations in the corridor. In 2022, creative work will hopefully be stimulated by two important events – a slowdown of the pandemic, which will reduce the need for remote work, and the relocation of the company’s new head office. The new office is located in the hagastaden life science cluster in Stockholm and has been customized for RaySearch’s needs, which includes conditions for cross-functional collaboration and contact.

FOCUS ON RAYCARE In 2022, development resources will be reallocated with a focus on further enhancements of RayCare. This involves further development of the enhancements added in December 2021, such as functionality and user configuration, and integration with more treatment machines.

One goal of the long-term development activities is to build systems for treatment planning that can handle all forms of cancer treatment – radiation, chemotherapy and surgery. In 2019, a dedicated module for planning chemotherapy treatments was added to RayStation, and a similar feature for surgery is under development.

WIDER USE One particular path of development is proton therapy, where the successful collaboration with the Belgian medical device supplier IBA will continue. This collaboration is focused on proton ARC therapy, which enables easier delivery schemes, decreased delivery times and improved dose conformality, and fLASh treatment planning, which has the potential to revolutionize the future of cancer treatment by delivering ultra-high dose rate radiation. In addition, efforts are ongoing with treatment planning methods to enable better management of tumors that move during radiation therapy with, for example, the normal motion of the patient’s body, such as breathing. The R&D department is investigating several methods that involve accounting for, or changing, the radiosensitivity of the tumor or healthy tissue. One example is fLASh, a new type of radiation therapy that reduces radiosensitivity in healthy tissue. Other possibilities under investigation in various research collaborations with clinics include hyperthermia, where radiosensitivity in tumor tissue is increased by heating, and dose painting, where a stronger dose is delivered to those parts of the tumor with low radiosensitivity due to, for example, oxygen deficiency.

Another example is new automated treatment planning techniques for multiple brain metastases, where both planning and delivery are often extremely time-consuming at present for complex cases. The new algorithms have the potential to reduce planning times from hours to minutes and enable the treatment of more metastases per beam, which shortens delivery times and improves the plan quality.