Nottingham City Hospital Chooses Quality, Throughput and Flexibility With TomoTherapy(R) Radiation Therapy System for New Facility

MADISON, WI–(Marketwire – September 9, 2010) – TomoTherapy Incorporated (NASDAQ: TOMO), maker of advanced, integrated radiation therapy solutions for cancer care, today announced that its technology will soon be used to treat cancer patients in Nottingham, England. The Nottingham Radiotherapy Centre will install the TomoTherapy^® Hi·Art^® treatment system in November as part of a service expansion and relocation. 

The TomoTherapy treatment system enables delivery of state-of-the-art CT image-guided intensity modulated radiotherapy (IG-IMRT), enabling the hospital to reinforce its leadership in high-quality, efficient cancer care for the people of the East Midlands of England.

The Nottingham Radiotherapy Centre serves a population of approximately 1 million and delivers 37,000 fractions of radiation therapy annually. The Centre provides complex external beam treatment including paediatric radiation therapy, intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT), continuous hyperfractionation, and total body electron and photon radiation therapy. The centre is part of Nottingham University Hospitals National Health Service (NHS) Trust, which is one of the country’s largest teaching hospitals.

Russell Hart, Radiotherapy Service Manager of the Centre, states:

“Our multi-disciplinary team is thrilled to be introducing TomoTherapy technology. Benefits will include better access for our patients to what we believe is the best delivery system for complex image-guided, intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IG-IMRT). The new machine will also mean that there will be some patients for whom curative treatment will now be possible whereas in the past treatment would only have been offered on a palliative basis. A clear advantage of the TomoTherapy system is the rapid installation time. This will enable us to have the high technology available in a short space of time — much quicker than a conventional linear accelerator.

Here at Nottingham, in line with national policy, we believe that four-dimensional (4D) Adaptive Radiotherapy is the future standard of care for radiotherapy treatment, and that the TomoTherapy Hi·Art system is the most sophisticated and best system to achieve this objective. We believe our equipment strategy will provide us with a full range of treatment options for the population we serve, with the TomoTherapy system best able to deliver the most complex dose distributions.”

Commenting on the key role TomoTherapy technology is playing in a publicly funded health service, Julie Mead, Director and Clinical Advisor from Oncology Systems Limited, states:

“The oncology team at Nottingham put all equipment vendors through a rigorous clinical and technical public tender evaluation. They clearly concluded that the TomoTherapy platform would bring significant benefits to a centre that is reported as having one of the busiest patient throughput figures per treatment machine, in all of the UK. Already having a linac IMRT programme in place, the Nottingham Radiotherapy Centre also saw the improvement in treatment quality that TomoTherapy technology would bring, along with centre-wide efficiency gains from allocating advanced treatments to the unit. In difficult financial times, the TomoTherapy platform offers not only the best quality radiotherapy, but also the highest efficiency for advanced IG-IMRT. The NHS looks at cost-effectiveness as a key criterion. The TomoTherapy platform fits the bill.”

Reinforcing the efficiency requirements so critical to the publicly funded NHS, Nottingham’s Russell Hart adds:

“We treat between 35 to 50 patients per normal working day on our linear accelerators, depending on the complexity of the work being undertaken. We aim to maintain that throughput and utilise TomoTherapy technology to its maximum, by treating up to 35 patients per day. Other NHS TomoTherapy customer sites have demonstrated that this is possible in the UK, but of course this will be a tremendous achievement in Nottingham as we clearly expect that the treatments delivered on the TomoTherapy unit will have far higher quality and complexity than what is feasible on the linear accelerator it is replacing.”

TomoTherapy technology is developed and manufactured by TomoTherapy Inc., and is supplied in the UK by Oncology Systems Limited, based in Shrewsbury, England.

About Nottingham University Hospital
Nottingham City University Hospital NHS Trust (NUH) is one of England’s busiest and largest acute teaching trusts. It provides acute and specialist services to 2.5 million people within Nottingham and surrounding communities from the Queen’s Medical Centre and the City Hospital campuses. The hospital’s annual budget is in excess of £682 million of public sector funding, housing over 1,700 hospital beds and employing over 13,000 staff.

Nottingham is the only city in the country to secure three successful bids for prestigious biomedical research units. NUH is working with The University of Nottingham to help to translate research findings for stomach, bowel and liver disease, hearing and respiratory disease into better patient care.

About Oncology Systems Limited
Oncology Systems Limited (OSL) is a privately owned limited company based in Shrewsbury, England. OSL is an exclusive supplier of radiation therapy technology to the UK and Ireland. It distributes TomoTherapy^® cancer treatment technology to the UK’s NHS and private radiotherapy facilities, and to both public and private providers in the Republic of Ireland.

About TomoTherapy Incorporated
TomoTherapy Incorporated develops, markets and sells advanced radiation therapy solutions that can be used to treat a wide variety of cancers, from the most common to the most complex. The ring gantry-based TomoTherapy^® platform combines integrated CT imaging with conformal radiation therapy to deliver sophisticated radiation treatments with speed and precision while reducing radiation exposure to surrounding healthy tissue. TomoTherapy’s suite of solutions include its flagship Hi·Art^® treatment system, which has been used to deliver more than three million CT-guided, helical intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) treatment fractions; the TomoHD^™ treatment system, designed to enable cancer centers to treat a broader patient population with a single device; and the TomoMobile^™ relocatable radiation therapy solution, designed to improve access and availability of state-of-the-art cancer care. TomoTherapy’s stock is traded on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the symbol TOMO. To learn more about TomoTherapy, please visit TomoTherapy.com.

©2010 TomoTherapy Incorporated. All rights reserved. TomoTherapy, Tomo, TomoDirect, TQA, the TomoTherapy logo and Hi·Art are among trademarks, service marks or registered trademarks of TomoTherapy Incorporated in the United States and other countries.