Elekta and Philips have started installing Elekta’s 1.5T MR-guided linear accelerator (MR-linac) at London’s Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) and The Royal Marsden. It will be the first high-field MR-linac system in the U.K.

ICR is a member of Elekta’s Global Research Consortium, which was started in 2012 to pioneer research and establish standards of care for prominent cancers. The Royal Mardsen, a U.K. hospital that specializes in cancer care, will work closely with ICR on cervical, breast and prostate cancer research.

“The MR-linac is likely to change the current standard of care in radiation therapy by allowing us to constantly image a targeted tumour during treatment and adapt the treatment to a patient’s unique anatomical makeup in real time,” Uwe Oelfke, head of the joint department of physics at ICR and The Royal Marsden, said in a statement.
“Bringing this technology into a clinical setting would be a profound step forward in a new era of personalised radiotherapy, with significant potential to improve patient outcomes,” he added.

As part of Elekta’s Global Research Consortium, the ICR and The Royal Marsden are the fourth of seven members to install the MR-linac system, following the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, The Netherlands Cancer Institute, and University Medical Centre Utrecht.

“MR-linac has the potential to transform the future of cancer care and we are grateful to all of our global consortium members and partners for their dedication to advancing leading-edge technologies that were previously thought to be impossible,” Tomas Puusepp, president and CEO of Elekta, said in a statement.

By the end of this year, all seven of the cancer centers participating in the consortium will have installed Elekta's MR-linac. The centers are currently involved in various stages of evaluation of the technology and are collaborating to establish new protocols for clinical research and develop methods for data collection and analysis.

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