University Health Network (UHN) and its spin-off company, Acumyn Inc., have secured an exclusive development and global distribution agreement with one of the world’s biggest radiation therapy companies, Elekta Ltd., to bring to market UHN’s AQUA quality management system software for radiation therapy clinics. The agreement will see UHN’s award-winning AQUA platform developed into a marketable product by Acumyn and then offered to cancer clinics around the world by Elekta, a leading manufacturer of linear accelerators for cancer treatment.
AQUA is a comprehensive software platform that coordinates and centralizes all of the quality assurance tests that need to be performed in a radiotherapy clinic, helping to manage the complexity of these testing requirements.
“AQUA fills a big gap that customers have today. A linear accelerator and associated devices need to be calibrated and maintained on a regular basis. AQUA provides a software link between all the disparate systems and manages the workload, scheduling and reporting of routine QA tasks,” says Dee Mathieson, Senior Vice President, Oncology Business Line Management at Elekta.
In use for the past two years at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, AQUA is a vendor-neutral product that has successfully connected, calibrated and managed over 20 of UHN’s cancer therapy machines. It was originally developed and clinically implemented by Drs. David Jaffray and Daniel Létourneau, of UHN’s Princess Margaret Cancer Center and Techna Institute.
“The current model for quality control (QC) in radiation oncology is to perform basic QC tests daily to detect machine performance while higher-accuracy QC tests are performed less frequently due to their time-consuming nature,” says Dr. Létourneau. “With AQUA, high-accuracy QC tests can now be performed daily in order to assess true machine performance and optimize the accuracy of radiation oncology treatment delivery.”
Acumyn Inc. was spun out of UHN with the purpose of bringing AQUA to market.
“We are delighted to have solidified this commercial relationship and cooperation with Elekta, which allowed Acumyn to complete its incubation phase. It is an important milestone in terms of commercializing UHN technologies and creating high-quality local jobs and globally significant healthcare products,” says Mark Taylor, Techna’s Director of Commercialization.
“Securing global distribution for a product while it is still in development is a huge achievement,” says Dr. Ferhan Bulca, Acumyn’s CEO. “It speaks to the clear need for a product like AQUA to simplify and eliminate human error and ensure that cancer therapy components are aligned to deliver the right amount of radiation to the right areas of the body.”
Elekta will begin piloting Acumyn’s market-ready version of AQUA starting in January 2015, before adding it to its commercial portfolio in April 2015.
For more information:
Mark Taylor, Director of Commercialization, Techna, UHN Technology Development & Commercialization
mark.taylor@uhnresearch.ca
Dr. Ferhan Bulca, CEO Acumyn Inc.
T: (416) 854-6599; E: ferhan.bulca@acumyn.com