(Courtesy of Englewood Health) The Lefcourt Family Cancer Treatment and Wellness Center at Englewood Health is the first center in New Jersey, and one of the first in the entire nation, to offer lung stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) with Varian Calypso® Anchored Beacon® transponders for lung. The team at Englewood Health has successfully performed this new, more advanced form of radiation therapy on an 83-year-old New Jersey resident with stage 1 lung cancer.
The Calypso System®, which was cleared by the FDA in April 2018, is the only device on the market that delivers real-time, 3D tumor position information 25 times per second, improving confidence that the prescribed dose has been delivered to the tumor.
Originally introduced for the treatment of prostate cancer, the Calypso System® uses transponders, each the size of a grain of rice. These transponders are inserted into and around the lung tumor and are used to continuously track the exact location of the tumor during treatment. This allows for previously unachievable levels of precision and accuracy, enabling better tumor targeting and sparing of nearby healthy tissue.
David Dubin, MD, chief of radiation oncology at Englewood Health, explains that “SBRT is a relatively new method of delivering very high doses to small, targeted areas. In lung, this is especially challenging as the target naturally moves as the patient breathes.”
“Calypso® is like a real-time GPS of the target, which is exceptionally powerful for lung treatments,” Michael Speiser, Ph.D., chief physicist at Englewood Health, said of the Calypso System®. “Restricting dose to the target and sparing healthy tissue requires that you know where the target is, and Calypso® lets us track the tumor with sub-millimeter precision.”
“Here at the Lefcourt Family Cancer Treatment and Wellness Center at Englewood Health, we have been successfully performing SBRT for multiple sites for years,” says Dr. Dubin. “However, not all SBRT is equal. This new technique provides a clear improvement in accuracy that is not otherwise achievable.”
