Radiotherapy (RT) is a mainstay of modern cancer treatment. Conventionally, RT is delivered to the patient lying on a treatment couch, while a beam steering device (gantry) aims the radiation from any angle around the target. Positioning the patients in upright body posture (upRT) instead enables to orient the patient arbitrarily toward a fixed beam. This enables smaller facility footprint and reduced treatment cost, placing upRT in the core of the UN sustainable development goals, and opening global access to advanced treatment options: 80% of cancer patients live in countries which host only 5% of the world’s RT resources. Moreover, upRT improves patient comfort and is associated with anatomical and physiological advantages, such as reduced breathing motion. It therefore comes as no surprise that, with new upright patient positioning & imaging solutions entering the market, upRT is enjoying a surge in interest. Yet, key scientific questions remain, international guidelines for upRT are lacking, and existing RT workflows are geared to lying patients. As the first clinics adopt new upRT technologies, there is a global need for trained professionals in industry, clinics and academia, to reach the promised benefits for patient care. UPLIFT builds this next generation of experts by addressing key research questions related to: treatment planning, clinical workflow and equipment design. Leveraging latest upRT technology available through our world-class consortium, UPLIFT propels Europe to the forefront of the upRT paradigm shift. UPLIFT focuses on: Learning (through its academic and clinical centres of excellence); Innovation (through its leading industrial partners); Fellowship & Training (through an outstanding cross-sector programme of workshops, secondments & mentoring). Input from patient advocacy groups and an internationally renowned advisory board will maximise its impact. UPLIFT will revolutionize modern RT, making it more human, accessible and sustainable.

TheraPanacea seeks to provide digital, innovative, patient-specific, and adaptive radiotherapy treatment planning system. Our objectives are the following: (i) improve the quality of treatment towards increasing the survival rate, while (ii) reducing the side effects towards diminishing the disastrous long term radiation impact and (iii) improving the efficiency of device use towards increasing significantly the number of patients being treated.

Current radiotherapy is fully reliant on semi-automatic treatment planning systems (TPS) that depend on highly toxic CT scans and human clinical expertise for creating a treatment plan. As a result, the procedure is inefficient and inefficacious resulting in poor treatment outcome and severe side effects. In recent years, there has been an emergence of the concept of MRI-guided radiotherapy, wherein non-toxic and high resolution MRI images are used to guide treatment planning. As a result, several key players in the radiotherapy market such as Elekta and ViewRay have introduced MRI embedded linear acclerators to perform MRI imaging during radiotherapy administration. However, as of yet no TPS exists on the market that enables fully automated MRI-guided radiotherapy, in order to provide real-time dose adjustment. To meet this market gap, TheraPanacea, a young start-up working on cutting edge AI technology, aims to introduce the world's first fully automated TPS for MRI guided radiotherapy - the ART-AI platform. This platform is built using state-of-the-art technology in reinforcement learning and employs proprietary Monte Carlo algorithms to perform anatomical simulation using MRI images to rapidly update the treatment plan on-the-fly. Moreover, the platform employs latest advances in positioning algorithms via a deformable registration framework to ensure automatic and precise patient position adjustment inside the linear accelerator. Thus, the ART-AI platform has the potential to revolutionize radiotherapy and enable it to achieve its full potential. In this SME-2 project, we will finalize the development steps of the platform, incoporate all the software modules into one suite and perform clinical validation in collaboration with our clinical partners. The end-result of this SME-2 project will be a fully validated software platform ready for commercial launch.