ViewRay, Inc. (NASDAQ: VRAY) today announced that San Pietro Fatebenefratelli Hospital in Rome has treated its 1,000th patient with MRIdian® MRI-guided radiation therapy. The center reached the patient milestone in less than three years by leveraging MRIdian to treat a wide variety of patients including those with complex and hard to treat tumors, demonstrating the system’s efficiency and clinical value.
“In addition to the system’s remarkable efficiency and reduction in treatment times, the clinical advantages of MRIdian have also become increasingly evident. With MRIdian we can deliver high doses in fewer fractions, target smaller volumes, and ensure significant doses are delivered only to the target, sparing healthy tissues proximal to the tumor. This means greater local control of the disease and a better quality of life for our patients,” said Prof. PierCarlo Gentile, Director of UOC Radiotherapy San Pietro Fatebenefratelli. “MRIdian has allowed us to address a variety of tumor types that were previously difficult to treat at therapeutic doses with conventional linacs, including very small lesions and those in challenging anatomical areas, such as inoperable neoplasms of the pancreas, kidney, liver, and lung. We can also now target tumor relapses, especially those close to vital organs such as the heart or large vessels, in which the use of radiotherapy treatment was previously controversial due to the high risk of toxicity.”
Since the installation of MRIdian at San Pietro Fatebenefratelli hospital in July of 2019, the clinical team has delivered more than 10,000 fractions, all of which were delivered using real time tracking and automatic beam gating. Seventy-five percent of patients treated with MRIdian at San Pietro Fatebenefratelli hospital were treated using stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) with automatic beam gating, and 20 percent received moderate fractionation (20 Gy), mainly for the treatment of prostate cancer. On average San Pietro Fatebenefratelli treats 20 patients per day, with more than 400 patients treated last year. This year the hospital is on track to treat more than 500 patients.
“Despite reports that some MRI-guided radiation therapy programs are struggling with treatment efficiency, our MRIdian centers are bucking the trend, with a quarter of all MRIdian centers on track to treat more than 300 patients per year,” said Paul Ziegler, chief commercial officer at ViewRay. “The fact that these levels of efficiency are being achieved by both large academic centers and community sized hospitals alike is a testament to MRIdian’s utility and value. Combine this with our customers’ treating an expansive variety of cancer types and impressive clinical outcomes being reported, the value proposition for MRIdian is clear.”
The MRIdian system provides oncologists outstanding anatomical visualization through diagnostic-quality MR images and the ability to adapt a radiation therapy plan to the targeted cancer with the patient on the table. This combination allows physicians to define tight treatment margins to avoid unnecessary radiation exposure of vulnerable organs-at-risk and healthy tissue and allows the delivery of ablative radiation doses in five or fewer treatment sessions, without relying on implanted markers. By providing real-time continuous tracking of the target and organs-at-risk, MRIdian enables automatic gating of the radiation beam if the target moves outside the user-defined margins. This allows for delivery of the prescribed dose to the target, while sparing surrounding healthy tissue and critical structures, which results in minimizing toxicities typically associated with conventional radiation therapy.
To date, over 25,000 patients have been treated with MRIdian. Currently, 54 MRIdian systems are installed at hospitals around the world where they are used to treat a wide variety of solid tumors and are the focus of numerous ongoing research efforts. MRIdian has been the subject of hundreds of peer-reviewed publications, scientific meeting abstracts, and presentations.