MR LINAC Bunker takes shape

Read the Royal Marsden progress report text and link here:

New state-of-the-art radiotherapy machine coming to The Royal Marsden, Sutton

A giant hole, large enough to fit 24 double decker buses, has been excavated at The Royal Marsden in Sutton to accommodate a new state-of-the-art radiotherapy machine, the MR Linac.

The Royal Marsden and The Institute of Cancer Research, London (ICR) are to become the first institutions in the UK — among a select group of international centres — to own and develop the pioneering MR Linac technology, thanks to a £10 million grant from the Medical Research Council.

The MR Linac combines two technologies - an MR scanner and linear accelerator - to precisely locate tumours, tailor the shape of X-ray beams in real time and accurately deliver doses of radiation of moving tumours.

Royal Marsden and ICR physicists, computer scientists, clinical consultants and radiographers will support Elekta in developing the technology in a pre-clinical research programme, before the MR Linac will be made available to cancer patients.

Professor Uwe Oelfke, Head of the Joint Department of Physics at The Royal Marsden and the ICR, said: "The MR Linac will allow us to constantly image the tumour during radiotherapy and allow us to adapt the treatment in real time. This would be a truly new practice and we would be entering into a new era of personalised radiotherapy."