A cancer treatment that precisely maps affected tissue, yet protects the cells around it by delivering hundreds of beams of radiation in an exact dose, may be at work in American hospitals by 2002. Called tomotherapy, it is the result of collaboration between Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Human Oncology and Medical Physics T. Rockwell Mackie and UW-Madison oncologist Minesh Mehta. Unlike standard radiation treatments, which employ uniform radiation beams, tomotherapy provides doctors with hundreds of safe coordinates. They can bombard cancer cells while delivering less harmful amounts of radiation to the surrounding tissue.

The treatment could eliminate some side effects from radiation exposure, and enable doctors to treat cancers such as pancreatic cancer, untreatable because many sensitive organs surround the pancreas. Tomotherapy also might improve treatments for prostate, liver and cervical cancers, and help doctors treat tumors more quickly.

Scientists at the university's Physical Sciences Laboratory have built a prototype tomotherapy machine, and with previous partner Paul Reckwerdt, Mackie founded TomoTherapy Inc. to bring the device to the medical marketplace.

Mackie, Mehta and a team of computer scientists also have perfected a software program that locks in a disease's coordinates, calculates the radiation dose and maps each radiation beam's destination. Called Pinnacle, it works on diseases other than cancer and annually helps doctors treat nearly 100,000 patients nationwide, including about 1,000 at UW-Hospital. Mackie and staff members Cam Sanders, Mark Gehring and Reckwerdt began the local company, Geometrics, to pursue Pinnacle's commercial potential.