NIH awards DoseOptics another $2 million to improve radiotherapy safety

SBIR grant brings NH startup’s total to $3.4 million

DoseOptics LLC, a startup launched by an alumnus and two professors at Dartmouth College’s Thayer School of Engineering, has won a two-year, $2 million Phase II Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Institutes of Health.

The award brings the total raised in a year by DoseOptics to $3.4 million in SBIR funding. The money was awarded to help the company to advance its radiotherapy imaging technology.

The company is developing technology capable of real-time imaging of radiation therapy to cancer patients during treatment. The company was founded to translate discoveries in the areas of cancer imaging and therapy, made through a collaborative effort between the Thayer School and Norris Cotton Cancer Center at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.

The funding will be used to further refine imaging systems that assist clinical teams in delivering treatments to the right place at the right time, safely and accurately.

These systems capture the low-intensity emissions of Cherenkov light coming from radiation interacting with tissue and use specialized triggering and image processing to remove background signals. The resulting images are a unique way to visualize radiation dose delivery to tissue, a capability pioneered by researchers Dartmouth.

With help from the Dartmouth Entrepreneurial Network, DoseOptics has exclusively licensed the technology from the college to continue the commercial prototyping of radiation dose imaging.

The company was founded by Thayer alumnus William Ware, CEO, along with Thayer professors Brian Pogue, president, and Scott Davis, managing Member. In addition, former Thayer professor Venkat Krishnaswamy is vice president of Technology.

The company is located at the Dartmouth Regional Technology Center in Lebanon.