Medical technology company Leo Cancer Care has closed a $65 million Series D funding round to expand its radiation therapy solutions using breakthrough upright treatment technology.
silicon valley you are a galaxy The company announced Wednesday that it led the round with support from new investors including Eventide Asset Management and continued support from existing investors. The company was founded in 2018 and has raised $155 million to date.
Leo Cancer Care plans to use the new funding to expand manufacturing and accelerate commercial expansion. The company says its integrated Upright platform spans proton therapy, photon therapy and imaging, with the same Upright architecture applied to all three, creating a unified approach to cancer treatment from diagnosis to planning to treatment.
Alongside the funding, Leo Cancer Care entered into major strategic alliances with major international medical companies, but executives declined to reveal the names of the companies.
The company is preparing for an initial public offering with the goal of a multibillion-dollar IPO by the end of the year, executives said.
The company started with the simple idea of having patients sit instead of lie down during radiation therapy. Leo Cancer Care’s technology provides a more “humane way” to deliver radiation therapy, while also reducing the size, cost and complexity of current radiation therapy equipment, company executives said. Executives claim the company can reduce the cost of proton therapy systems by 50%.
An upright, eye-level position also provides a better experience than lying flat under a machine as it allows patients to talk and maintain eye contact with the clinical team at all times.
Stephen Towe, CEO and co-founder of Leo Cancer Care, said in an interview with Fierce Healthcare that the company’s goal is to revolutionize radiation therapy through simplification.
Mr Toh, a physicist, worked at leading radiotherapy equipment manufacturer Elekta before partnering with serial medical technology entrepreneur Lock McKee to launch Leo Cancer Care. The core technology and concept for keeping patients upright came from the University of Sydney, Australia.
Tow argued that the industry’s approach to innovation at the time was to take radiation therapy as is and add new functionality and features.
“While that innovation has led to improvements in clinical efficacy, the approach to innovation of taking a platform and adding to it means that the platform continues to become larger, more expensive and more complex,” he said. “The mission behind Leo is to change that, to go back to the drawing board and ask the basics.”
“We look around the industry and see that radiation therapy, and more broadly, diagnostic-to-therapeutic platforms, are now available in top-tier centers and academic medical centers in the United States, and even in some centers in Europe. But given the financial situation, much of the world today does not have access to such technology. “Historically, other people have tried to provide a platform to change that, but the approach has always been to remove functionality or features to make more money,” Tou said.
Although proton therapy allows for the highest level of precision, which is especially important for children and adults with cancer near vital organs, proton therapy centers are an expensive investment for health systems. Traditional proton therapy requires large construction projects for these devices, as hundreds of tons of steel, concrete, and equipment must be rotated around the patient to reach the angle needed for treatment and deliver the radiation beam.
LEO Cancer Care executives say these traditional systems can cost more than $100 million, putting the technology out of reach except for a few specialized centers.
“This technology has been very successful in treating cancer patients, but the idea of rotating a 100-ton object around a 200-pound patient is as crazy as changing a light bulb in a house by lifting the house and rotating it around a fixed light bulb,” Toh quipped.
“The technology worked, but it was being developed at a price point that was completely out of reach for the vast majority of patients. Changing that was our real mission from day one. And we kept the radiation beam fixed, and we rotated in front of that fixed radiation beam. We changed that by treating upright patients very slowly. This dramatically reduced the size of these machines and saved our customers the equivalent of approximately $500 million in savings across our existing customer base.”
Combined with the microaccelerator, the footprint will be reduced to one-fifth of a traditional footprint (from more than 29,000 square feet to about 1,700 square feet), making the civil engineering project more akin to installing key instruments within existing radiation therapy storage, according to Leo Cancer Care executives.
A growing body of research worldwide shows that this may support more consistent anatomical positioning and organ stability compared to traditional supine (lying) treatment. The company’s upright imaging system has received 510(k) clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and future applications across radiology are planned.
Major cancer centers are already adopting an upright approach. In June, Stanford Medicine performed the world’s first compact upright proton beam therapy to treat a 7-year-old child with a complex brain tumor.
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and McLaren Healthcare are among the institutions implementing the Upright platform into their programs. The company aims to expand its products to smaller regional community-based networks as well.
Leo Cancer Care has 57 contracts in 13 countries and plans for significant growth in the coming years. The company plans to reach more than 50 proton beam systems in 26 countries within five years.
“We now have significantly reduced technical risk and eliminated regulatory risk. The company is a success story and is cash flow breakeven,” Tower said. “It’s not about further mitigating technological risks; it’s about bringing what is now well-established and proven by Stanford to a truly global stage and delivering the impact we always knew we could deliver.”
By reducing the cost and physical footprint of proton and photon therapy, Leo Cancer Care is democratizing innovation for healthcare providers, executives claim.
“Users like Stanford University are partnering with hospitals in Vietnam and hospitals in India, and those hospitals are deploying this technology at the same time, and that happens very rarely, if ever, in a medical setting. Typically, this phased approach allows the top two to be the first to deploy and innovate. “Once we get one academic medical center, and as volume increases and prices come down, we then start deploying the technology to our regionally based U.S. hospitals, and then ultimately hospitals in places like India will reap the benefits many years from now. India is in an almost unique position alongside Stanford to deploy this technology, given the multifaceted value proposition of better care and better health economics,” Toh said.
Deng said future applications across radiology will extend beyond radiation oncology. “The next logical and natural step for us is to consider broader radiology applications, surgical planning, lung cancer screening, and all of the same patient and clinical benefits that apply to that field as well,” Tower said. “What we’re really doing as a company is looking at the whole of medicine and saying, if we’re proving now that it’s better to treat patients standing up, why don’t we challenge a paradigm shift for all clinical procedures that have historically been done supine?”
“Leo Cancer Care is poised to revolutionize cancer care in more than 10 countries, with many of our facilities being the first of their kind in their regions or countries,” PR Yu, founder of Yu Galaxy and a long-time investor in the company, said in a statement. “The upright radiotherapy and radiology techniques pioneered by Leo are lowering the cost of cancer treatment, shortening treatment times, and providing options that previously didn’t exist for pediatric and larger patients. As a result, we have dramatically expanded access to both radiotherapy and diagnostic radiology to a much larger number of people.”
