ViewRay, Inc. (NASDAQ: VRAY) today announced that the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas purchased a MRIdian® MR-Guided Radiation Therapy System. This will be the first MRIdian system to be installed at MD Anderson main campus at the Texas Medical Center in Houston, Texas.
As one of the largest cancer centers in the world, MD Anderson Cancer Center has been working to eliminate cancer for more than seven decades. MD Anderson Cancer Center has consistently ranked as one of the top two hospitals in cancer care every year since U.S. News & World Report began its annual “America’s Best Hospitals” survey in 1990; their physicians are frequently recognized as among the best in the nation by services including Best Doctors in America.
“MD Anderson Cancer Center recognizes the value of MRIdian’s solutions to deliver MRI-guided radiation therapy. By offering on-table adaptive therapy with real-time, multiplanar tissue tracking and automatic beam control, physicians can deliver ablative doses with tighter margins confidently with MRIdian,” said Paul Ziegler, Chief Commercial Officer of ViewRay. “We are excited about the opportunity to work with MD Anderson’s world-class clinicians to further pioneer the role of MRIdian SMART (stereotactic MR-guided adaptive radiotherapy) to expand the field of radiation therapy.”
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, nearly 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. For a list of treatment centers, please visit here.