Cancer. A word that inspires so much fear. Although not as much today as fifty years ago. Then only one out of four cancer victims survived. Today as many as 60 per cent are cured.  A dramatic improvement that we owe to the dedication of many great men and women.

As February 4th is World Cancer Day we would like to pay tribute to one of these pioneers – Lars Leksell – who in the early 1950s decided to take on one the most feared types of cancer – the brain tumour.

To reduce the staggering mortality rate for patients undergoing brain surgery he devised the stereotactic frame with its 3-dimensional coordinate system. The frame makes it easier to target a tumour and therefore treat it with greater precision.  He also developed the Gamma knife, which enables so-called non-invasive brain surgery – a procedure that requires no incisions in the patient’s skull.

The Gamma knife accurately aims many narrow beams of high-intensity radiation to converge on one spot. Each individual beam is relatively low energy, so the radiation has little effect on intervening brain tissue. The method is gentler, more effective and cost-efficient than traditional open surgery.

The technology is still at the core of modern radio surgery, but refined and developed by companies like our client Elekta – the company that was founded by Lars Leksell. Radio surgery today means a significant lower dosage and sub-millimetre precision. Patients get safer treatment and more healthy surrounding tissue is spared. To date half a million patients have been treated using this technology.

Read more about radio surgery and Elekta on their new homepage.