Jeff Amacker, Tibaray - Spotlight Interview | LSI USA ‘23

Transcription

Nick Talamantes  0:14  
Jeff, thank you so much for joining me in the LSI Studio today. 

Thank you, Nick

Tell me a little bit about the work you're doing at Tibaray, 

Jeff Amacker  0:20  
Well we're making a new radiation oncology treatment machine that will treat cancer patients in a fraction of a second. 

Nick Talamantes  0:25  
That's already a very fascinating elevator pitch. Now, tell me a little bit more about the technology.

Jeff Amacker  0:31  
Yeah, the technology to make this happen, came out of the SLAC National Accelerator lab, because linear accelerators were designed in the 1960s. And so it's a whole new concept in linear accelerator technology, it's much, much more efficient than the current accelerator. And that enabled us to get a lot more power out of each accelerator. And then we put 16 of them in a ring and focus all that energy on the tumor all at once. And so instead of taking a few minutes to get your cancer treatment done, it's a fraction of a second. And that's, that's important, because while you're laying there, having your treatment done, your tumor moves around. So we treat large volumes of normal tissue to in order to make sure we hit the tumor, and instead of doing that boom image at treat it, you're done. No tumor motion, and the biology is better. If you treat very, very quickly, the radiation does the same amount of damage to the tumor, but less damage to the normal tissue. So we're going to be able to up doses, cure more cancer patients, and do that with fewer side effects. 

Nick Talamantes  1:33  
Let's get into that in a moment, but really quick for the uninformed like myself, what is a linear accelerator? 

Jeff Amacker  1:41  
So a linear accelerator is a device that accelerates electrons. So you have electrons that shoot in from an electron gun on one end of it, and it accelerates them up to very high energies out the other end of it. That's it pretty simple. 

Nick Talamantes  1:59  
It seems pretty simple. But I think there's a bit more to it, but maybe not for this conversation, the energy requirements then for this linear accelerator? Is this something that you need a nuclear power plant in your backyard to be able to run this? What is sort of the energy demand look like for this type of technology? 

Jeff Amacker  2:17  
Yeah, that's a great question. The, the power that the accelerators run at is obtainable out of wall outlets, but you got to store the power and then concentrate it and send it to the machines. But it's pretty normal power that is required to do these things. We concentrate that power into a really short period of time. So our peak power is more but because the accelerators are so much more efficient, we actually will do it with half the power requirement of a current radiotherapy accelerator.

Nick Talamantes  2:48  
Is there anything else that's novel about your radio, or your linear accelerator that distinguishes it from the traditional ones that you've mentioned that have been around for decades? 

Jeff Amacker  2:59  
Yeah, it really comes down to a whole new concept, which makes it a much more efficient accelerator. And with doing that, you can either get a lot more power out of it, or use a lot less power to get the same beam out of it. And that has applications. We're doing it first for radiotherapy, but it has applications in other areas like cargo scanning. For example, the limiting factor in cargo scanning is the rate at which they can take images. And so trains have to slow down in order to be imaged, we would be able to up that by a factor of five, and you might be able to image trains without them even having to slow down. So that's one example. Cargo scanning. Security scanning is another place, possible replacement of radionuclides that are used for a number of things, everybody's worried about radionuclides for dirty bombs and things like that if they get out and we can replace those a number of different applications for the core technology. We are focused on radiotherapy first, and we want to go cure cancer patients. So that's our primary mission now. 

Nick Talamantes  4:02  
So focusing on cancer right now, is there a specific solid tumor that you guys are looking at in the clinical stage? 

Jeff Amacker  4:09  
Yeah, great question. The radiotherapy is used in 60% of cancer patients. So it's many different types of tumors, we will be able to treat any type of tumor that is suitable for radiotherapy. Now, tumors that move a lot will get an extra benefit out of this. So lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, anything that in where things move around a lot, they'll get an extra benefit out of doing it. So we'll probably target those first but anything that's suitable for radiotherapy which is any tumor anywhere in the body, that's what we'll be able to go after.

Nick Talamantes  4:40  
Does this require a novel imaging technique? Are you working with what's already in the hospital today in order to target and then quickly blast that solid tumor with energy? 

Jeff Amacker  4:50  
Yeah, fortunately, diagnostic imaging today is fast enough. So we will we put a diagnostic Imager on the front of part of our machine, take an image of the tumor and boom treated. So we don't have to invent new imaging in order to make this happen.

Nick Talamantes  5:04  
What stage are you guys at right now then? Are you currently in human testing or

Jeff Amacker  5:08  
No, no way before that we have built and shown that we can actually take that concept for linear accelerator and build it. So we've built accelerators have been coming out of them. We have three accelerators in use at Arizona State University for biological imaging machines. So the first application actually ended up not being radiotherapy for the accelerators. But it allowed us to prove what we were doing there. And now we have our first medical accelerator that's already in terms of the actual accelerator, and other pieces of technology, we've done that and shown that we can do it now we have to go design the whole machine. So at this point, I'm here at LSI to raise $30 million for a Series A in order to go build the prototype of the 16 beams.

Nick Talamantes  5:54  
So as far as doing research for talking with you, I noticed that you guys use flash technology in your platform. What is flash?

Jeff Amacker  6:02  
Flash is treating in a very, very short period of time. And if you do that, there's a biological benefit, where you do less damage to the normal tissue in the course of doing that type of a treatment. The research labs and all the academic centers that do radiotherapy are trying to study why we don't actually know why it works. But it works for many, many different tissue types, where we get this radial biological advantage out of doing flash.

Nick Talamantes  6:28  
Are there other companies currently doing or developing radiotherapy technology that to harness this flash effect?

Jeff Amacker  6:36  
Yes, all of the proton therapy vendors are chasing doing flash radiotherapy, with protons. Problem that they have is it doesn't solve the overall problem, because the machines are just way too expensive. Proton therapy centers are massive, very expensive devices. And if we want to solve the problem for the masses, that doesn't do it. So the proton vendors are doing it, there are a couple of other startups that have concepts for trying to do this. And all of them are sacrificing the actual dose distribution, doing a really good job of sculpting the dose to the tumor, and avoiding the other critical structures in order to get the high speeds. And we're not going to do that we think it's a shame to throw away 30 years worth of development and radiotherapy just so you can treat fast.

Nick Talamantes  7:20  
When you look at putting in these large installations, like an insert, like an MRI system into an operating room, this usually entails a significant costs and maybe even a restructuring like pulling out a wall to bring the MRI into the hospital. Is this going to be the case with your technology where there's going to be a significant restructuring of a room or investment required in order to bring the technology into a facility? 

Jeff Amacker  7:49  
Yeah, that's that's a very important question. Often the facility work can cost more than the equipment, right? In our case, we're designing it specifically to be sure it fits into an existing radiotherapy vault. We already talked about how it takes less power. So we'll be able to make use of the existing power, that existing AC will work. All the things that we need inside of an existing radiotherapy vault will still work for us. So the facility cost should be very small. And that's by design. And because then we can we can do it.

Nick Talamantes  8:20  
So are there other technologies in the sort of radiotherapy market that are potentially a competitor to what you're doing? I know that EBRT is definitely the leading one. Is there anything else in development that could potentially consume market share and take away from what you're doing?

Jeff Amacker  8:39  
Yeah, radiotherapy as long as I've been in the field of radiotherapy has always there's always been the the magic bullet was going to show up and wipe out radiotherapy. And the most recent version of that was immunotherapy. And what's ended up happening is it's gone the other way. Radiotherapy and immunotherapy work together very well. The radiation actually accentuates the strength of the immune response when you're taking immunotherapy. So is that will the silver bullet pop up yet? Maybe but it's not obvious that that's, that's coming.

Nick Talamantes  9:13  
Well, Jeff, thank you so much for stopping by the studio and telling me about the work you're doing at Tibaray. It's been a pleasure.

Jeff Amacker  9:19  
Thank you very much. I really appreciate the opportunity.