The Future of Cancer Treatment: Tina Yu Interview
Episode Summary
In this episode, host David Raubach sits down with Tina Yu, CEO of Mevion Medical Systems — one of the two dominant proton therapy equipment manufacturers in the world today. Tina traces her unlikely path to the role: raised in China, trained as a biologist, she earned her PhD in chemistry and biophysics at Princeton under Professor George McLendon, then transitioned to the business world through Harvard Business School. After years as a healthcare investor, she was recruited by Mevion’s board in 2018 to lead the company — her first CEO role — drawn by the stark gap between proton therapy’s proven clinical value and its extreme underutilization worldwide.
Tina offers a compelling view of proton therapy’s history through the lens of technological generations. She describes Proton Therapy 1.0 as Harvard Cyclotron Lab’s 40-year run treating roughly 10,000 patients; 2.0 as the hospital-based era pioneered by Loma Linda (1990) and Mass General Hospital (2001) with massive, football-field-sized, $200 million multi-room facilities; and 3.0 as Mevion’s own founding vision — born “on the back of a napkin” in 2004 by former Mass General and Harvard Cyclotron physicists including Dr. Ken Gall and Dr. Skip Rosenthal — to create a single-room system that could cut project cost and footprint by 10x. That vision led to the world’s smallest self-shielded high-energy proton accelerator for medical use, co-developed with MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Lab, with the first patient treated at Washington University Barnes-Jewish Hospital in December 2013.
The centerpiece of this conversation is Mevion’s announcement of FDA clearance for the S250 FIT system — what Tina calls Proton Therapy 4.0. The FIT reduces the accelerator volume by 80% compared to Mevion’s already-compact gantry system, enabling the entire proton therapy workflow to fit inside a standard linear accelerator (Linac) vault. With roughly 4,000 Linac rooms in the United States and over 10,000 globally, compared to fewer than 50 U.S. proton centers today, the potential market expansion is enormous. Stanford Health Care is the first adopter and announced their goal of treating the first patient by year-end. Other early adopters include University of Nebraska Medical Center, Baycare Health, Atlantic Health System’s Morristown Hospital, and in a full-circle moment, Loma Linda Medical Center — the pioneering institution of the 2.0 era.
A significant innovation embedded in the FIT system is upright patient treatment, made possible through a partnership with Leo Cancer Care and their advanced robotics-based patient positioning chair. Tina directly addresses naysayers by recounting how Dr. Charles Enke, Chairman of Radiation Oncology at University of Nebraska Medical Center, went from a skeptic in 2020 to one of the program’s earliest committed adopters after visiting Mevion’s Littleton, Massachusetts headquarters — ultimately emailing Tina that he was “willing to bet my retirement savings on the success of this product.” David adds clinical credibility, noting his firsthand experience with upright chair treatment at the Oklahoma Proton Center, which he describes as an early pioneer of the approach.
Beyond the hardware, Tina outlines Mevion’s patient-centric culture and its evolving role as an operational partner to proton centers. She describes bringing pediatric cancer survivor Grace Eline — who attended the State of the Union address in 2019 after being treated on a Mevion machine at Robert Wood Johnson Hospital — to Mevion’s headquarters twice to connect employees to the mission. She also previews Mevion’s growing international footprint: a Tongji Hospital installation in Wuhan, China, has treated over 200 patients in its first eight months across a wide range of indications, and a second Chinese installation is underway at Chongqing Tumor Hospital. Newly hired marketing director Fern, arriving from Penn Medicine, signals Mevion’s intent to bring best-in-class operational practices and payer education support to proton centers nationwide.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode
- Proton Therapy Generations (1.0 – 4.0): Tina frames proton therapy’s evolution across four eras — from Harvard Cyclotron Lab through hospital-based multi-room systems, to Mevion’s single-room 3.0, and now the vault-integrated 4.0 FIT system.
- Mevion S250 FIT & FDA Clearance: The newly FDA-cleared S250 FIT reduces proton accelerator volume by 80%, fitting the entire system into a standard Linac vault — opening access to roughly 4,000 existing rooms in the U.S.
- Upright Patient Treatment: The FIT system treats patients in an upright seated position rather than supine, enabled by a partnership with Leo Cancer Care’s robotic positioning chair, with millimeter-precision motion control and 2D X-ray alignment.
- Single-Room Proton Therapy Origins: Mevion was founded in 2004 on a napkin-sketch concept by former Harvard Cyclotron and Mass General Hospital physicists, with core IP co-developed alongside MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Lab.
- Converting Naysayers Through Evidence: Dr. Charles Enke of University of Nebraska went from skeptic to committed adopter after a single site visit to Mevion headquarters, ultimately writing to Tina that he was ready to “bet my retirement savings” on the FIT’s success.
- China Market Expansion: China’s government has issued over 65 proton/heavy-ion licenses; Mevion’s first Chinese installation at Tongji Hospital in Wuhan treated more than 200 patients across diverse indications within eight months of opening in December 2024.
- Patient-Centric Culture at a Manufacturing Company: Mevion connects factory and engineering employees to patients by bringing cancer survivors — including pediatric patient Grace Eline — to their Littleton, Massachusetts headquarters, and by rotating field service engineers through clinical sites.
- Reimbursement as a Barrier to Access: Insurance company education and timely reimbursement remain significant operational challenges for proton centers; Mevion sees addressing payer relations as part of its vendor responsibility, not just a clinical-side issue.
- FDA Collaboration on Innovation: Mevion’s 8,000-page FIT submission benefited from a modular review process and collaborative dialogue with the FDA, which Tina describes as an open-minded partner in bringing advanced medical technology to market.
- What “Mevion” Means: The company name derives from MeV (megaelectronvolt) and ion — a nod to the physics of proton beam therapy — coined by Senior VP of Commercial Success Lionel Bouchet, himself a trained medical physicist.
- AI and Next-Generation Imaging: Tina previews a 2–5 year horizon in which AI-driven workflow simplification, enhanced imaging integration, and broader indication coverage will make proton therapy easier to deploy globally with less specialized training overhead.
- Operational Partnership Model: With Fern joining from Penn Medicine as marketing director, Mevion is shifting toward active operational support for its customer centers — sharing best practices in patient volume, staffing, and payer navigation beyond the equipment sale itself.
Tina Yu’s journey from biology student in China to CEO of a company redefining cancer treatment access is a testament to what happens when scientific rigor, business acumen, and a patient-first mission converge. Mevion’s arc — from a napkin sketch in 2004 to FDA-cleared vault-integrated proton therapy in 2024 — mirrors the broader story of proton therapy itself: decades of incremental proof building toward a tipping point. With the S250 FIT opening the door to thousands of existing Linac rooms, upright treatment becoming a clinical reality, and China emerging as a major growth market, the momentum Tina describes feels less like optimism and more like inevitability. For patients who live far from today’s 50 U.S. proton centers, that momentum is everything.
Full Transcript
Read Full Transcript
David Raubach: Tina, thank you so much for joining us today on the Cancer Project podcast.
Tina Yu: Thank you, David. It’s such an honor to be here.
David Raubach: Well, you have an amazing story. You’re the CEO of Mevion, one of the two primary proton therapy equipment vendors active today. I’d love to hear how you ended up in the role that you’re in today. Tell us about your background, where you grew up, how did you end up working for a proton therapy company.
Tina Yu: That’s a great question. It’s clearly my privilege to have this position and lead an extremely dedicated, very intelligent, passionate team in proton therapy. I did not grow up in the space. I grew up in China. I was trained as a biologist. I always knew I wanted to do something in the healthcare space but never really went into medicine — the blood really scared me off. I’ve always been a STEM major, learned biology in undergrad, then came to the U.S. for my PhD in chemistry. I studied biochemistry and biophysics at Princeton, following Professor George McLendon. That was a great experience — a lot of good training that really honed those analytical skills and prepared me for later stages of my life.
Tina Yu: Then I worked for a large pharma company as a research scientist and became attracted to the dynamic nature of the business world, so I went to Harvard Business School to transition to being a business person. The school clearly has a mission of educating leaders who make a difference in the world, and that planted a very strong seed. After Harvard Business School I started as an investor, working with and investing in a lot of fantastic companies. In 2018, I had the pleasure of being picked by the board of Mevion Medical Systems to lead the company. That was my first CEO gig, to be frank. It took me a while to adjust to this kind of leadership role, which is clearly very different from the finance world, but I’ve been enjoying it.
David Raubach: And where did you do your PhD?
Tina Yu: I did it at Princeton. I studied chemistry, following Professor George McLendon.
David Raubach: You said you got picked by the Mevion board to be the CEO. What was your connection with Mevion, or how did you come across the company?
Tina Yu: Our investment fund invested in Mevion, so I was a board adviser for a couple of years, and that led to the decision especially when we were thinking about global expansion for Mevion Medical Systems. I think over the last seven-plus years one of the major accomplishments from my perspective has been international expansion as well as new product introduction.
David Raubach: That first instance where you were learning about Mevion or learning about proton therapy — what stands out to you as you think back to encountering it for the first time?
Tina Yu: As an investor I was very used to hearing about new technologies on many fronts, but proton therapy struck me as something with so much potential that was also being so underutilized due to a lot of economic factors — which in business is a prime problem to solve. It really piqued my interest. We clearly see over the last 60 years all the clinical evidence showing the superior performance for cancer patients using proton therapy, yet even when I was looking at the company around 2014 or 2015 there were fewer than about 100 centers globally, with about 30 centers in the U.S. That was huge underdevelopment of a sector. For any business person looking for opportunity, you want really concrete science — the biology and the physics are all demonstrated. And you want a huge amount of upside. Today globally there are more than 10,000 Linac rooms, about 4,000 in the U.S., but even now we have close to only 50 proton centers. That’s at least one order of magnitude of growth potential.
David Raubach: What were some of the biggest challenges for you right off the bat when you moved from board advisor and investor into actually running this company?
Tina Yu: I didn’t grow up in the radiation oncology space. Learning the nature of the business, the long sales cycle, how to work in a community — that was the first challenge. I remember when I started the job I thought, maybe I should raise my sleeves and get my hands wet and really know who’s who in this community. So I asked my people for the top five in radiation oncology making a major impact in proton therapy and got to know them. I think quite a few of them are on your podcast — like Dr. Steve Frank and other major leaders in our space. These were the early people I got to know, trying to understand through their eyes what my potential customer base was thinking, what their pain points were, and what an innovative device company could do to solve those challenges.
Tina Yu: The second part was internal operation. As a finance person you probably don’t get much opportunity to go very deep about internal operations — from early stage design through design challenges to R&D efficiency and then downstream to production. Proton therapy is a very complex machine with more than 10,000 parts. Typical software or vendor-provided tools are really not suited for these relatively low-volume but very high-value products. And then you have the service business. Customer satisfaction has always been our number one corporate goal. How do we make sure the machine is constantly running and giving customers more and more upgrade as the years go by? This is not just a piece of equipment we roll out a door. This is a living machine that moves along with societal technology advancement to deliver ever better functionality.
Tina Yu: I was fortunate to be surrounded by a group of true world-class experts. My Chief Technology Officer Mark Jones and my VP of advanced development put a curriculum together just to teach the CEO about the products and all the design choices we were making. Initially it was just for me, but then we opened it up and it became lunch sessions where all employees — including new hires — could learn the basic fundamentals of some of our design choices and unique advantages.
David Raubach: What have you learned about yourself through that process?
Tina Yu: There are clearly tough moments and tough challenges in running an organization as a leader. Understanding my inner voice and inner strengths has been very critical. I lead without the technical advantages that many of my predecessors had — decades of deep knowledge and network in the space — so I lead from a very different angle. I have to lead by example, and from a softer side, because technical advice has not been my primary value-add. I lead by leadership spirit and the strive for excellence. You have to ask yourself what you want to accomplish and what’s needed to achieve that. If we do not go above and beyond, if we do not strive for excellence, if we do not have a patient-centric culture — why are we here?
David Raubach: You talked about a patient focus, but you’re an equipment vendor — most of your team is not going to directly interact with patients. How do you make sure that the people putting parts together or doing engineering drawings or installing systems maintain that connection with the patient?
Tina Yu: It’s really difficult. When I look at our people working in their cubicles on intensive engineering drawings in SolidWorks, how do we guide them on why they are doing this? My VP of People Operations, Sandra Rousell, did a fantastic job building a culture so that our people in Littleton, Massachusetts understand what’s happening at our sites running across the U.S., in Europe, in China. We bring patients to our facility. We actually brought one pediatric patient in twice — Grace Eline. She was a sort of poster child for a presidential pediatric cancer initiative and attended the State of the Union address in 2019 because of her history of becoming a cancer survivor as a pediatric patient. She was treated on our machine at Robert Wood Johnson Hospital. We brought her story to our employee base — how good her recovery has been, one year out and almost five years out. Her mom shared how fortunate they are to live 20 minutes from a proton center, and how she’s become a very active patient advocate working with other pediatric patients.
Tina Yu: Last June we had a patient come from Huntsman Cancer Institute — a 12-year-old boy with a kind of brain cancer who wants to be a quarterback on a football team. That’s his dream. He and his father talked about how after proton therapy they went back to normal life and he could go back to football practice to realize his dream. I don’t know whether he’ll be the next Tom Brady, but he’s going to have a fantastic life. We also send our employees over to clinical sites and rotate them in and out so they understand the intensity of clinical treatment — why every minute matters, why we can’t just wait until 6 a.m. to ship a part. And we bring our field service engineers back to Littleton so the rest of our employees understand the lives they lead when a machine is down and they sometimes have to work 20 hours a day.
David Raubach: I’m on the clinical side working at a proton center, so I do have the opportunity to interact with patients on a day-to-day basis and get that daily reminder of why we do what we do. I think it’s so important to make that connection upstream with the equipment vendor. What has it meant for you personally to get the opportunity to work in the field of cancer?
Tina Yu: I think for me this has also shaped my character. The proudest moments have always been grand openings of our cancer centers — seeing all these great advancements our customers and other proton users collected to show the benefit of this modality. I sometimes tell the patients coming to visit us, “You give all of us meaning in life.” Making money is important — I don’t want to diminish that — but that’s probably not the only thing in life. When I celebrate these moments with my customers at their first 100 patients, first 1,000 patients, first 2,000 patients — those are proud moments I will never forget.
David Raubach: Tell us about the history of Mevion as a company because I think the company itself has a really fascinating story.
Tina Yu: I also want to bring the history of Mevion in the context of the history of proton therapy. At this ASTRO we’re running a corporate event called “Proton Rising: Celebrating 60 Years of Innovation.” Proton therapy 1.0 started with Harvard Cyclotron Lab treating cancer patients over a 40-year history, treating close to 10,000 patients. Then Loma Linda and Dr. Slater and his team brought proton therapy to the hospital setting — that’s Proton Therapy 2.0. The accelerator technology at that time was very large, very heavy, very expensive. You had to use one accelerator to power multiple treatment rooms, which led to very high project costs — normally in the $200 million range — and facilities the size of a football field. Very few institutions could afford that. Loma Linda started treating in 1990, then Mass General Hospital started treating in 2001.
Tina Yu: Mevion was founded in 2004. Many of our founders came from Mass General Hospital and Harvard Cyclotron Lab. We would not be here today without all the fruits and experience gained from those 1.0 and 2.0 eras. The founding team came out with a very different vision: proton therapy should be accessible to all medical institutions for their subset of cancer patients who need this precision radiation therapy. So the company was born on the back of a napkin. The dream was — if we can design something so small that the accelerator can go on a gantry and treat all 360 degrees around the patient, we can meet all clinical requirements while dropping the total cost by 10x and the size by 10x. One of our technology founders, Dr. Ken Gall, who was head of medical physics at Mass General Hospital, was truly the mind behind some of the early design. Dr. Skip Rosenthal, who worked at Harvard Cyclotron Lab and later became chief physicist at Mass General, was also on the founding team. Sitting in Massachusetts, we had the benefit of tremendous talent. Our early core IP was co-developed with MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Lab, and we were able to achieve the globally still smallest self-shielded high-energy proton accelerator for medical use.
Tina Yu: Washington University Barnes-Jewish Hospital was the first strong backer willing to commit to using our machine. There were a lot of naysayers — about whether single-room was the future, about whether we could be successful in our development. It was a long, difficult journey, and it took us almost 10 years from founding to the first patient treatment in December 2013, led by Dr. Jeff Riley and his team at Wash U Barnes-Jewish Hospital. We’re extremely grateful for that partnership. Then Georgetown University was our first adopter for pencil beam scanning — a more precise way to deliver proton therapy — and they treated their first patient in March 2018.
Tina Yu: Today we’re in Proton Therapy Era 4.0 — by making it even smaller, miniaturizing the system by 80% in volume, so it can fit into a typical Linac vault. We call this Proton Therapy 4.0. Stanford University Stanford Healthcare became the first adopter, and they believe that yes, the 3.0 system is beautiful, but there are still many institutions that do not have extra space or cannot build a separate structure. What we provide here is a truly integrated system where everything can fit into a typical Linac room. After Stanford adopted the machine, we announced it three years ago at ASTRO and have subsequently had quite a few other institutions adopt it — including NCIs like University of Nebraska Medical Center, large community hospitals like Baycare Health and Atlantic Health System’s Morristown Hospital, and most recently — and we’re extremely proud of this — Loma Linda Medical Center itself adopting this technology as their chapter 2.0.
David Raubach: Congratulations on the FDA approval for the Mevion FIT system. With about 4,000 Linac vaults in the United States, it really does open up a market for proton therapy that maybe didn’t exist three, four, or five years ago. When Mevion first came out with the single-room concept, there were naysayers. There are still naysayers questioning whether patients can be treated in an upright system. How do you address those concerns?
Tina Yu: There are obviously a lot of technical reasons we can go into about why we believe this treatment has a lot of advantages. But from my perspective across my entire career — investing and now leading innovative companies — addressing the concerns of naysayers has always been part of what moves us forward. The naysayers had a lot of questions about whether pediatric patients can be treated, how we deal with motion, and all these things we had thought about for years, if not decades. We did not take that step very lightly. We have a lot of solutions designed to preempt all these questions — and we want to hear any questions we may not have addressed yet, so we can design experiments to address them.
Tina Yu: I myself have had the pleasure of converting some naysayers. Dr. Charles Enke, the chairman at University of Nebraska Medical Center, wasn’t a believer in 2020 when we launched the S250 FIT for upright treatment modality. He had a lot of concerns. However, he was the first group to come to our Littleton headquarters to see firsthand how we designed it and how we addressed his questions. He wanted to treat peds — we support ped treatment, Stanford supports ped treatment. Dr. Henker has done a lot of work showing how peds can be treated on this upright system. He also had a lot of questions about how we address motion when patients are rotating. We showed him the lasers and the 2D X-rays we use to make clinicians comfortable in that environment. A month after his visit, he wrote me an email saying, “Tina, I’m going to bet my retirement savings on the success of this product.” I was flattered. I said, you know, Warren Buffett always says never bet against America — and working with Mevion, a U.S.-based company, is investing in America. The product won’t be perfect from day one, but it’s a continuous engineering evolution of excellence, and I have full confidence we will address all these clinical concerns.
David Raubach: I want to say that I am a believer in upright treatment because I’ve seen it firsthand. The Oklahoma Proton Center, where I work most of the time, had a chair and treated patients in a chair — I think it was in terms of modern proton therapy the first chair that was developed. The second iteration of that chair ended up at the Procure Center in Chicago, and to this day they still treat patients upright. The most important thing with the whole endeavor is it really is about creating more access for patients. Even if you can treat 95% of patients that you could treat on a gantry, those are 95% of patients in a particular market who may otherwise not have had access to protons at a place like Stanford.
Tina Yu: We want to acknowledge all that pioneering work you and Northwestern and others did. That’s inspiration — and we also see some of the drawbacks and what we can improve on. Most innovations come from building on past experience. What you did paved the road for us to design this product. We work with Leo Cancer Care because of their ingenuity and the most advanced robotics technology, which lets us control patient motion at millimeter-level precision — very difficult to do say 10 or 20 years ago. And we’re open-minded and look forward to new ideas and new technology, especially with AI, that may let us do it even faster, easier, and at even lower cost. This is a great time for innovators.
David Raubach: Where did the name Mevion come from?
Tina Yu: That’s a great question — and we actually use it to test people. It’s part of our interview questions for physics or engineering candidates. We say, “Hey, can you figure out what Mevion really means?” Tell me your guess.
David Raubach: Well, the first thing that comes to mind is M-E-V, megaelectronvolt, and then I-O-N, ion.
Tina Yu: You’re hired! That is the test. I think it was probably Lionel Bouchet who coined the name — he’s our Senior VP of Commercial Success. He was on the marketing team at the time and is a medical physicist by training. That’s what I love about working at Mevion — all the clever things you can appreciate.
David Raubach: Tell us what’s happening with the Chinese market and proton therapy. That’s not something we hear a lot about here in the United States, but I know it’s near and dear to your heart.
Tina Yu: This is obviously a huge, underserved population market. Proton therapy was introduced to China much later than to large markets like Europe and Japan, and it represents today one of our fastest-growing markets because of market demand. Proton therapy in the past has always been very unequally distributed, strongly correlated with economic development at the country level, state level, even city level. The Chinese government just issued more than 65 licenses for proton therapy, heavy ion, and all of that. That’s a very vibrant market, and I think for the next 5 to 10 years it’s going to be very significant. Our first machine in China is installed at Tongji Hospital in Wuhan City in Hubei province. They started treating in December 2024, and over the first eight months they treated more than 200 patients across a variety of indications — from kids as young as 6 years old to older adults of 80-plus — across a very broad indication mix: head and neck, CNS, CSI, lung, breast, prostate. We provided more than 99% uptime for that machine overseas, a great kudos to our team, especially the field service team running that site from the U.S. with a lot of local China support. I’m going next month to China for a rigging ceremony for one of the top five hospitals in Chongqing — Chongqing Tumor Hospital.
David Raubach: You’ve also just hired a new marketing director, Fern, who’s fantastic, coming from Penn Medicine. One of the things you’ve talked about is this vision for how Mevion is going to support customers operationally beyond just the technology itself. Talk about how you want to partner with and support customers in a different way than has existed historically with equipment vendors.
Tina Yu: In the end, customer success is our success — we cannot live in a vacuum. Customer success is measured on a lot of parameters. First and most important is can they treat a reasonable number of patients within reasonable hours for the operation to run? After that there are clearly research opportunities, talent attraction, other halo effects that measure a proton center’s success. To get a reasonable patient volume in the center today, even in the U.S., there are still reimbursement challenges with proton therapy — insurance companies still need to be better educated on what proton therapy can bring. In the end this modality saves the total cost of the system over a long period of years. It’s not a cost center — it’s a value provider. But that message may not yet be agreed upon by all insurance companies. We need to work with our partner medical institutions together to lower the patient rejection rate. Dr. Steve Frank’s recent article about the benefit proton therapy brings to head and neck patients is tremendous — especially over long duration in terms of overall survival benefit and much reduced side effects and the cost of treating those side effects.
Tina Yu: Fern worked at Penn Medicine for years and helped build their program very successfully. Penn Medicine has been a beacon in our community for their leadership in proton therapy, bringing it to their main center and satellite sites. As a vendor, we want to bring those best practices to all other centers, especially our customer centers, so we can make them more successful. Not all centers have the depth of staffing and resources that Penn Medicine has.
David Raubach: What are some of the exciting things on the horizon for Mevion over the next two, three, five years?
Tina Yu: We’re living in a very exciting time and we have two platforms. One is the gantry-based platform, with 13,000 patients treated on it, and that platform is still evolving — treating faster, with better integration of other tools. Then we have the fixed-beam platform with patients being treated upright — that’s a more nascent platform that needs a lot more R&D investment and close work with medical institutions and partners. After the first patient treatment, the three key areas ahead of us are: first, the breadth of indications we can treat within this new platform; second, efficient workflow; and third, superior treatment plan quality. We’re already doing all the early work as we speak. For the next two to three years, those will be demonstrated not only on paper but in patients and the studies we need to do together. In addition, with AI really empowering the innovative economy we live in, there are many tools we’re revisiting — in imaging, in innovation and integration — that we believe within the next five years will make proton therapy much easier to use and deploy to many more institutions and countries.
David Raubach: Last question. What are you personally most proud of over the last five years?
Tina Yu: There are many proud moments, and it can be a few. Initially I do want to say the FDA clearance for our newest baby, the S250 FIT. I don’t think people appreciate the fact that that’s many, many years of work. The project itself took three-plus years, but in reality it builds on our two decades of innovative work. That’s clearly one of the high moments. More importantly, it’s the human touch — when I see patients like Grace Eline and talk to her mom, and look at the difference that makes. Some kids who cannot get this treatment carry side effects that are going to be a burden to the family and to the society — these are the things we can avoid. When we had the Huntsman Cancer Institute patient come over, I thought: yes, this boy is fortunate to be treated by proton therapy. But our opening was delayed by at least three months, and if we had opened three months earlier, more patients like him could have been treated with this modality. That’s what keeps us driving. We have to run. We cannot stall. For me those are the best moments — when you truly feel like this is not something just on the wall on a piece of paper. It’s something with all the flesh and blood, you can feel and touch. It warms my heart. It warms all my employees’ hearts. We are collectively as a team, living in this great ecosystem, making a difference in the world.
David Raubach: Amazing. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Tina, and thank you for sharing your personal story and the story of Mevion and all the great things that you guys are doing in the proton therapy space. We’re fortunate to have you personally involved and the company involved, and as you said, we’re changing lives and making a difference for people that are going through something that’s really really difficult. For me, I know that’s something that is just really rewarding to be a part of, and I’m excited to see where things head.
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