Medical technology company Leo Cancer Care closed a $65 million series D financing round to scale its radiotherapy solution that uses groundbreaking upright treatment technology.
Silicon Valley’s Yu Galaxy led the round which was backed by new investors including Eventide Asset Management, alongside continued support from the company’s existing investors, the company said Wednesday. The company, founded in 2018, has raised $155 million to date.
Leo Cancer Care plans to use the fresh financing to scale manufacturing and accelerate commercial deployment. The company's integrated upright platform spans proton therapy, photon therapy and imaging — the same upright architecture applied across all three, creating a unified approach to cancer care from diagnosis and planning through to treatment, according to the company.
Alongside the financing, Leo Cancer Care has entered a major strategic partnership with an international healthcare giant, but executives declined to name the company.
The company started with a simple idea: have patients sit up for radiation treatment rather than lying flat. Leo Cancer Care's technology offers a more "human way" to deliver radiation therapy, according to company executives, while also reducing the reducing the size, cost and complexity of current radiation therapy equipment. The company can reduce the cost of a proton therapy system by 50%, executives claim.
The upright, eye-level position also provides a better experience for patients as they remain in conversation and eye contact with their clinical team throughout, rather than lying flat beneath a machine.
The company's aim is to innovate radiotherapy through simplification, noted Stephen Towe, CEO and co-founder of Leo Cancer Care, in an interview with Fierce Healthcare.
Towe, a physicist by background, worked at Elekta, a large radiotherapy equipment manufacturer, before teaming up with serial med tech entrepreneur Rock Mackie to launch Leo Cancer Care. The core technology and concept for upright patient positioning spun out of the University of Sydney in Australia.
At the time, the industry's approach to innovation was to take radiotherapy as it was and add new functionality and features, Towe asserted.
"That innovation drove clinical efficacy improvements, but that approach to innovation, take the platform and add to it, just means that the platform continues to get bigger, more expensive and more complicated," he said. "The mission behind Leo is to change that, go back to the drawing board and question the fundamentals."
"We looked around the industry and we saw radiation therapy, and more broadly, a platform of diagnostics into treatment that's been made available to centers in top-tier centers and academic medical centers in the U.S. and it's been made available to certain centers in Europe, but there's huge portions of the world today that don't have access to technology like that, given the financial profile. Other people historically have tried to deliver platforms that change that, but the approach has always been let's remove functionality or features in order to get the price point down. The way that we looked at that is to say that's a bit like taking a car and trying to get the price down by removing the wheels or removing the engine," Towe noted.
Proton treatment allows for the highest level of precision, which is particularly important for children and for adults with cancers near vital organs, but proton therapy centers are a pricey investment for health systems. Historically, these devices required big construction projects as conventional proton beam therapy requires rotating hundreds of tons of steel, concrete and equipment around the patient to reach the necessary angle for treatment and deliver the radiation beams.
These conventional systems can exceed $100 million, putting the technology out of reach of all but a handful of specialist centers, according to Leo Cancer Care executives.
"This technology is really successful in treating cancer patients, but the idea of rotating 100 tons around a patient that weighs 200 pounds is as crazy as changing a light bulb in your house by picking up the house and rotating it around your fixed stationary light bulb," Towe quipped.
"The technology worked, but it was being developed at a price point that was completely inaccessible for the vast majority of patients. That was really the mission from day one to change that, and we changed that by keeping the radiation beam fixed and very slowly treat the rotating and upright patient in front of that fixed radiation beam. That's reduced the size of these machines dramatically and saved customers, we project now about $500 million worth of cost savings across our existing customer base already."
Paired with ultra-compact accelerators, the footprint collapses to five times smaller than a traditional footprint — from over 29,000 square feet to about 1,700 — turning a civil-engineering project into something closer to installing a major appliance inside an existing radiotherapy vault, according to Leo Cancer Care executives.
Growing global research indicates this may support more consistent anatomical positioning and organ stability compared with conventional supine (lying-down) treatments. The company's upright imaging system has received 510(k) clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and there are planned future applications across radiology.
Leading cancer institutions are already adopting the upright approach. Stanford Medicine delivered the world’s first compact upright proton therapy treatment in June, treating a seven-year-old child with a complex brain tumor.
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and McLaren Health Care are among the institutions bringing the upright platform into their program. The company aims to expand its products to smaller, regional community-based networks as well.
Leo Cancer Care has signed 57 contracts across 13 countries with plans for strong growth in the next five years.
"We're in a position now where we've really reduced the technical risk, we've eradicated the regulatory risk. The company is a success story, we're cash flow break-even," Tower said. "I's not about reducing technical risk any further. It's about taking something that's now well established and has been proven by Stanford and take it to a truly global stage and delivering that impact that we've always known we can deliver."
By reducing the costs and physical footprint of proton and photon therapy, Leo Cancer Care is democratizing innovation for healthcare providers, executives assert.
"You've got users like Stanford hand-in-hand with hospitals in Vietnam and hospitals in India that are adopting this technology at exactly the same time, and that very rarely, if ever, happens within healthcare. Normally, you get this tiered approach where you'll get the top two academic medical centers that go and innovate first, once the price comes down with volume, then you can start to take the technology to community-based U.S. hospitals, and then finally, many years later, hospitals in places like India get to benefit from that technology. Given the multifaceted value proposition of better medicine plus better health economics it's almost a unique position where you see India adopting alongside Stanford," Towe said.
Future applications across radiology expand beyond radiation oncology, Towe said. "The next logical and natural step for us is to go and look at things like broader radiology applications, things like surgical planning, lung cancer screening, all of those same patient and clinical advantages apply in that segment too," Tower said. "What we're really doing as a company is going looking at not far off the entirety of healthcare and saying, if we've proven now, as we have, that it's better to treat these patients upright, why do we not go and challenge the paradigm shift of all clinical procedures have historically been done supine."
“Leo Cancer Care is poised to revolutionize cancer treatment in more than ten countries, with many installations the first in their region or country,” PR Yu, founder of Yu Galaxy and a long-time investor in the company, said in a statement. “The upright radiotherapy and radiology technologies Leo has pioneered are lowering the cost and shortening the time of cancer treatment, and providing options that did not exist before for pediatric patients and patients of larger body size. The result is a dramatic expansion of access to both radiotherapy and diagnostic radiology for a far larger population.”