DoseOptics LLC announced today that the US National Institutes of Health has awarded the company a Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant totaling $2 million over 2 years. This brings the total raised in 1 year to $3.4 Million SBIR funding that the company has received to advance radiotherapy imaging technology. The early stage start-up is developing novel 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 Thayer School of Engineering 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.

DoseOptics was founded by Thayer alumni, William Ware MS Th’94 (CEO), and Thayer professors Brian Pogue (President) and Scott Davis Th’06 (Managing Member). Former Thayer professor Venkat Krishnaswamy is engaged as the VP of Technology. The company is located at the Dartmouth Regional Technology Center in Centera Park, Lebanon NH.