Dalhousie University Developed Cancer Treatment Technology Receives Acoa Atlantic Innovation Fund
Developed by James Robar, Faculty of Medicine, chief of Medical Physics at the Nova Scotia Health Authority (NSHA) and director of Dal’s Medical Physics program and his team, Andy Fillmore, Member of Parliament for Halifax, visited Dal’s campus on June 23, 2017 to announce the new $2.1-million funding through the government’s Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA) Atlantic Innovation Fund (AIF).
This investment marks the beginning of a new partnership between the Nova Scotia Health Authority (NSHA), where the Dal researchers are based, and Germany’s Brainlab AG — a medical technology giant that will commercialize the radiation treatment technologies in countries around the globe.
The goal of this AIF project over the next four years is to expand the work on developing and improving technologies that allow doctors to deploy cancer radiation treatment in more precise, less-invasive ways, improving patient outcomes. The technologies range from a capacitive patient-monitoring system that provides sensitive readouts many times a second about where a patient is during treatment to an algorithm that can enable more precisely target radiation treatments that result in less damage to surrounding healthy organs and tissue. The project will hire eight new employees, including a project manager, two medical physicists, an engineer and several PhD students.
“Although there is currently no definitive cure for cancer, it is through the work of researchers like Drs. Robar, [Christopher] Thomas, [Mike] Sattivariand and [Alasdair] Syme that we can improve the quality of treatment for people coping with cancer,” – Andy Fillmore, Member of Parliament for Halifax.
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