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 to 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 to 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
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Transcript generated from the episode’s audio. Speaker names are identified from the context of the conversation rather than from recorded speaker data, and automatic transcription may misspell names and terminology. Please refer to the video for the authoritative version.
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. But 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: Oh, that’s a great question, David. You know, it’s clearly my privilege to be able to have this position, lead an extremely dedicated and also very intelligent, passionate team in proton therapy. I did not grow up in the space actually, and I grew up in China. I was trained as a biologist.
David Raubach: Okay.
Tina Yu: And I always know I want to do something in the healthcare space, and I never really go to medicine. I think that the blood really scared me off. So I didn’t train that way, but I’ve always been a STEM major and learned biology in undergrad. Then I came to the US for my PhD in chemistry. I studied biochemistry and biophysics there, and I thought it’s a great experience, a lot of good training in the PhD program, really hone those analytical skills and really sort of prepare me in the later stage of my life. Then I work for a large pharma company as a research scientist, then move on, really being attracted to the dynamic nature of the business world, so I went to Harvard Business School
David Raubach: Okay.
Tina Yu: to transition to be a business person, and over there, you know, the school clearly has a mission of educating leaders who make a difference in the world, right? That kind of really plant a very strong seed about what we want to do is make a major difference in the world. And for me, healthcare, how to make a difference in healthcare has always been a question. So I started after Harvard Business School as an investor, and also working with, and also invested in a lot of fantastic companies, you know, see their tremendous amount of growth, and 2018 I had the pleasure to be picked by the board of Mevion Medical Systems,
David Raubach: Okay.
Tina Yu: you know, to lead the company, lead its operation. You know, that’s my first CEO gig, to be frank. You know, it took me a while to adjust to this kind of leadership role, which is clearly very different from a finance world, but I’ve been enjoying it. So today I’m really honored to be here. Yeah.
David Raubach: So, where did you do your PhD?
Tina Yu: I did it at Princeton, and I studied chemistry.
David Raubach: Okay.
Tina Yu: You know, followed Professor George McLendon.
David Raubach: And so, 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 that company?
Tina Yu: Okay. Yeah. So, our investment fund, you know, invested in Mevion. So I was a board adviser for a couple years, and then that led to the decision, especially when we’re thinking about global expansion for Mevion Medical Systems. So, you know, I think over the last, you know, seven plus years, I think that one of the major accomplishments from my perspective has been, you know, international expansion as well as new product introduction.
David Raubach: So that first instance where you’re learning about Mevion the company, or I guess learning about proton therapy, what was that like? What were you, what kind of struck you or what stands out to you as you think back to learning about proton therapy for the first time?
Tina Yu: Yeah. So as an investor, I was very used to hearing new technologies on many fronts, especially in the healthcare space, but proton therapy, you know, was struck to me as something, you know, with so much potential, but it also being so underutilized, and due to a lot of economic factors, which in business, you know, it will be a prime problem to solve, right? So it really piqued my interest. And we clearly see, you over the last, say, 60 years, all the clinical evidence showing the superior performance, you know, for cancer patients using proton therapy. However, even today, right, when I was looking at the company, that’s 2014 or 2015, okay, you know, it was even a smaller field, but that was, you know, less than, you know, probably 100ish centers globally, right, in the US about 30 centers, you know, a little bit over 30 centers at that time. So that was a huge, huge underdevelopment of a sector.
Tina Yu: So for any business person, you know, looking for, you know, opportunity to invest and put their time on, is you want to have, you know, really concrete science, right? The biology, the physics is all demonstrated, right? So that’s the dream space. And also you want a huge amount of upside, which is today, you know, for the typical Linac you have globally more than 10,000 Linac rooms, right, even in the US about 4,000 Linac rooms, but here, even today, we have a little bit close to 50, you know, proton centers. So that’s at least, you know, one order of magnitude, or even two orders of magnitude, kind of growth potential. So that’s for me is, you know, a dream place, you know, for people to make a mark. When you say make an impact, you know, in the society or make a difference, you know, in the world, these are the clear areas, you know, people can plug in and make a difference.
David Raubach: So, what was the hardest part of the transition for you, going from board advisor, investor, you have a science background, you did go to business school, but then now you’re running this company. What was, what were some of the big challenges for you right off the bat?
Tina Yu: Yeah. So, you know, I didn’t grow up in the radiation oncology space, right? And learning about the business, you know, the nature of the business, the long sales cycle, you know, how to work in a community, right, get to know the people, you know, has been, you know, the first challenge. So I remember when I started the job, you know, I was like, huh, maybe I should really, you know, sort of raise my sleeves and get my hands wet, and I should really know the who’s who in this community. So I ask my people, say, who are the top five in radiation oncology and make a major impact in proton therapy, right? So I kind of get a list and get to know them. I think quite a few of them are on your podcast.
David Raubach: Yeah, right.
Tina Yu: Like a Dr. Steve Frank and, you know, all these, you know, major leaders in our space. So these are the early people I kind of get to know, try to, through their eyes, right, these are my potential, they represent my customer base, right, what do they think, what are their pain points, what can an innovative device company, you know, come in to solve these, you know, issues, these challenges, right? Then the second part is internal operation.
David Raubach: Okay.
Tina Yu: Right, you know, as a finance person, you probably, in general, don’t get much opportunity to go very deep about the internal, you know, operation, which go from, say, early stage design and then to, you know, the design challenges, to the R&D, you know, efficiency, then go downstream for production, right, their supply chain, then all these very detailed problems. I mean, proton therapy is very complex machine, right, more than 10,000 parts, you know, put it all together.
David Raubach: Wow.
Tina Yu: Right? So very few, I mean, few people had the opportunity to, you know, to tackle that problem. Typical software or typical vendor provided tools are really not used to for these relatively low volume but very high value kind of product production, right? Then afterwards you have the service business, right? The customer satisfaction has always been our number one corporate goal, right? Then how do we make sure the machine constantly running, and also giving them more and more upgrade as the year goes by, right? This is not just a piece of equipment we roll out of a door. This is a living machine, right, and kind of move along with the societal, you know, technology advancement, you know, to deliver even better functionality. So all these things I have to sort of start from square one.
Tina Yu: I remember I was talking to an advisor about, hey, how would I transition to be, you know, a world-class CEO, that’s my goal, right, then clearly, you know, not there yet, but on the road, hopefully, then, so he was like, hey, maybe get your, you know, technology people educate you. So I was, you know, very fortunate, you know, to be surrounded by a group of true experts. They’re the world class, I truly believe we have the world class number one team in proton therapy, to educate me. Then initially that was Mark Jones, my technical chief technology officer.
David Raubach: Okay. Right.
Tina Yu: So he and my VP advanced development put a curriculum together, just teach the CEO, you know, about the products and all these design choices we’re making. Yeah, we actually think maybe I should open it up. Then we become lunch sessions. So in addition to me, all my other employees, and also including some new employees, can learn about the basic fundamentals about some of the design choices we make, what are the unique advantages we do. So all these things help me, you know, to transition from a finance person into an operational role.
David Raubach: What have you learned about yourself through that process?
Tina Yu: Yeah, it’s a great question. You know, there are clearly tough moments — yeah, tough moments — and, you know, the tough challenges. This, you know, running an organization as a leader, you know, some people may be born with it, and some people may just learn a bit harder, right? So for me, understand my inner voice, inner strengths, you know, has been very critical.
David Raubach: Yeah. Right.
Tina Yu: And leading the team, especially when I lead without the technical advantages, right, a lot of people, you know, my predecessors, all had decades of deep, you know, knowledge and network in the space, and so, you know, I kind of lead from a very different angle, right? So I have to, you know, lead by example, lead from a little bit more softer side, because I do not provide too much of a technical advantage or advice, you know, to the table, right, that has not been my strength in terms of value add. I think I lead by a little bit more of the leadership spirit and the strive for excellence, right? I have to push people.
David Raubach: Right?
Tina Yu: You know, there are many, many times we have to make trade-offs, right, these are tough trade-offs, you know, no machine is perfect, right, then they all have their own advantages, then the trade-off has to be guided by certain corporate principles, then in the end you call it culture, right? So that’s, you know, the sort of the concrete part of the culture. Culture could be a very vague word, that in the end it’s what people do. Then these things, I don’t do it, it’s the main, every single small decision you make — do you do 2 a.m. shipping for your customer?
David Raubach: Okay.
Tina Yu: Right? So that’s a cost associated with that, that’s a manpower associated with that. Then how would you make an operation 24/7? When we commit to our customer, we do 24/7 services, right, every minute count for their machine, right?
David Raubach: Right.
Tina Yu: What does that really mean? Then you have to build an organization to work around that. So all these things, you know, I didn’t get there from first try, right, I learned it gradually. And when you ask me what I learned about, you know, leadership, these are the small things here and there, you know, encompass into. Then I think all in all, as a leader, you have to ask yourself, what do you accomplish, right, what do you want to achieve, then 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, a patient focused culture, why are we here?
David Raubach: Yeah. Right.
Tina Yu: So every day you have to ask yourself these tough questions.
David Raubach: Right?
Tina Yu: These questions are not easy to be addressed, and they don’t come in in the vacuum, right, they have to be, you know, every person in the organization have to follow all these our so-called corporate value, right? Then so that’s that’s what I see, then the corporate value I have to be the person believe in and drive for it, right? So that’s what I call leadership.
David Raubach: Yeah.
David Raubach: So you talked a little bit about a patient focus. You’re an equipment vendor. You make a machine, most of your team is not going to directly interact with patients. How do you make sure that the people that work at Mevion that are putting parts together, or doing engineering drawings, or installing systems, maintain or have that connection with the patient?
Tina Yu: That’s a great question. It’s really difficult, right, because most my people walk, you know, in their cubicle, they do intensive engineering drawings, right, they use, you know, SolidWorks and all these fancy tools, right, then what do we guide them to say, why you are doing this, why do they need to come in weekends, you know, to finish this, what’s the importance of this timeline, right, why do we have to have 2 a.m., you know, logistics team, right, you know, that’s so inconvenient, right, for anyone’s life, right? And also on Father’s Day I sometimes I have to call certain people in, you know, to do certain things, right? So how do we bring a culture to be patient focused? And we did — I mean, I am also collaborating with our people operations team, my VP Sandra Rousell did a fantastic job for building a culture, so that our people in Littleton, Massachusetts, understand what’s out there — in the US our sites running, and also even in Europe our sites running, in China our sites running, we’re a global company, right? So we bring patients to our facility, and I think we actually bring one of the pediatric patients twice, you know, Grace Eline.
Tina Yu: She was, you know, a sort of a poster child for one of the presidential pediatric cancer initiatives, and yeah, I think 2019 she attended the State of the Union address. So, you know, because of her history of, you know, becoming a cancer survivor as a pediatric patient, she was treated on our machine at Robert Wood Johnson, okay, hospital. And so we bring that story to our employee base to show how good her recovery has been. Then we brought her in a year after she was treated. We brought her in almost 5 years after she was treated, right? Her recovery journey clearly showed the benefit of proton therapy, the impact to herself, to her family. Then her parents both came along with her, and also her little brother. So her mom shared the story about how they are so fortunate to be living 20 minutes away from a proton center. But her mom is also a very active patient advocate, you know, looking at working with other pediatric patients. These things are not available for the super majority of pediatric patients.
Tina Yu: So then we tell our people, right, tell our employees, why is that, why is that everything what they do day in day out make a difference in the world — if we have more machines closer to the pediatric patients, more patients are going to get treated, because that’s a group that benefits the most from proton therapy, but at the same time that is a group least mobile, need the most of having the greater access, or easier access, to proton therapy, which today we have not gotten there yet. So I think these things clearly make a difference. And last June we had a patient coming from Huntsman Cancer Institute.
David Raubach: Okay.
Tina Yu: You know, a — I think a 12-year-old boy with a sort of unique, with a kind of a brain cancer, was treated there. You know, he wants to be a — sorry, he wants to be a quarterback on a football team.
David Raubach: Okay.
Tina Yu: So that’s his dream, and then he and his father talk about how, after proton therapy, they go back to a normal life, then he can go back to his football practice and realize his dream. I do not know whether he will be the next, you know, Tom Brady or not, you know, but let’s root for him, but he’s going to have a fantastic life. We also have some, you know, young adult patients coming to our facility, and we also send our employees over to clinical sites and rotate them in and out, so that they understand the intensity of clinical treatment, why every minute matter, right, why can’t I just come in at 6 a.m. instead of 2 a.m. to get that part shipped, right? So then, through these processes, they understand it.
Tina Yu: Then we also bring our field service engineers come back — they are the group of our employees closest to our customers, right? I told them, I mean, me, Tina Yu, as a CEO of the company, I actually don’t represent the company — you guys serving our machine, you know, carrying our mission out, you truly represent the company, because you interact with our customers day in day out, they see you, right, every day their machine needs your support. So we bring them back to Littleton, Massachusetts, our headquarters, you know, to give our employees — what kind of life they living, right, when the machine is down they sometime have to work 20 hours a day, I hate to do that.
David Raubach: Right?
Tina Yu: I hate anyone to do that, right? But sometimes, you know, things do happen, right? Their devotion really is infectious, you know, to our employees, and, you know, we want to, you know, look up to them, and we have a lot of awards and, you know, advocate for these kind of driving for excellence, these kind of customer, patient centric performances.
David Raubach: So, you that’s amazing, and I think that that’s such a great approach. You know, I’m on the clinical side, working at a proton center, and so I do have the opportunity to interact with patients on a day-to-day basis, and so I’m getting that daily reminder of why we do what we do. And so I think it’s so important to make that connection upstream a little bit, with an equipment vendor like Mevion, connect your team to those patients. So that’s amazing that you guys are doing that. What has it meant for you personally to get the opportunity to work in the field of cancer? Because cancer is one of those things that impacts everybody. It impacts friends, it impacts family members. So what has it meant for you personally to be able to be involved in the field of cancer care?
Tina Yu: I think that for me, this also shaped my character, right? You know, so I think for me the proudest moment has always been at a grand opening of our cancer centers, right, then to see all these great advancements, you know, our customer or other, you know, proton users collected to show the benefit of this modality, right, so that kind of bring value, you know, to life, right? I sometimes I told the patients coming to visit us, I said, you give all of us meaning in life, right, making money is important, don’t — I mean, I don’t want to diminish that, right, then, but that’s probably not the only thing in life, right, then there is a much bigger goal. So when you are thinking about, hey, ask yourself, are you making a difference in the world or not, right, then all these technical risks we’re taking on product innovation, then the things we’re doing driving ourselves to that excellence, which clearly is very, very hard.
David Raubach: Yeah.
Tina Yu: Right? Then you can’t just, you know, lock work, you know, at work, then say, oh, bye, you know, I’m going to take a vacation, a lot of times we just don’t have that luxury to do that.
David Raubach: Yeah.
Tina Yu: Right? So these are very hard choices, you ask yourself why you’re doing that, right? So all these clear evidence of the benefit out of proton therapy keep us going, and for me personally that means a lot, and I feel like, hey, I can see the fruit, you know, of our hard work directly, right? Then I’m kind of luckier than some of our employees, because I got the good opportunity to celebrate these moments really, you know, with my customers, when they open the center, when they treat the first 100 patients, first thousand patients, first 2,000 patients — these are, you know, proud moments, you know, I will never forget in my life.
David Raubach: Yeah, tell us about the history of Mevion as a company, because I think the company itself has a really fascinating story.
Tina Yu: Yeah, I think that’s a great question. I also want to bring the history of Mevion in the context of the history of proton therapy, and at this ASTRO we’re running a corporate event called Proton Rising, celebrating 60 years of innovation. That’s, you know, 60-year innovation that started from 60 years ago, Harvard Cyclotron Lab started treating cancer patients with proton therapy. Then they treated close to 10,000 cancer patients over a 40-year history.
Tina Yu: That’s a great milestone, which we call it as proton therapy 1.0. Then Loma Linda, and Dr. Slater and his team, right, brought proton therapy to hospital setting. That’s the so-called proton therapy 2.0. Then, those were during — the technology at that time, the cyclotron, or the synchrotron, the accelerator’s very large, it’s huge, right, and very heavy and very expensive. So with that kind of technology, you have to essentially use one accelerator to power multiple treatment rooms, right, so it’s kind of being limited by that at the time. But at the same time that leads to a very high cost of the project — normally the cost of the project is, you know, $200 million, you know, kind of range, and the size of the facility is the size of a football field, right, then, you know, 100-yard length and all that, right? So very few institutions can afford that, right? Then, so after Loma Linda started treating in 1990, right — I call it the year 2.0 — then Mass General Hospital started treating in 2001.
Tina Yu: So they also have those — we call multi-room systems — but they truly paved the road about proton therapy in the hospital setting. Mevion came in, we were founded in 2004.
David Raubach: Okay.
Tina Yu: So many of our founders came from Mass General Hospital, and also some of them worked at Harvard Cyclotron Lab, right? So we would not be here today without all the fruits and the experience gained from the year — 1.0 and 2.0, right? So we came out, the founding team came out, have a different vision. We believe proton therapy should be accessible to all medical institutions that need this advanced radiation therapy for their subset of, you know, cancer patients who need this unique, more precision radiation therapy, right? So we have a very different design. So the company was born on the back of a piece of a napkin.
David Raubach: Wow.
Tina Yu: Okay. Then, you know, that’s a dream. So the dream was, if we can design something so small, the accelerator, right, then we can put it on a gantry and treat all 360 degrees around the patient, we can achieve all the clinical — meet all the clinical requirements — at the same time drop the total cost of the project by 10x, drop the size by 10x, right? So that’s what, you know, we start out to do.
David Raubach: Yeah. And so the back of a napkin — who were the people involved at that point?
Tina Yu: Yeah. So our one of the — I mean, technology founder is Dr. Ken Gall,
David Raubach: Okay.
Tina Yu: who used to be the head of medical physics at Mass General Hospital, and also with some other elite hospitals he contributed as well. So he was truly the mind behind some of the early design. We also have quite a few people, like a Dr. Skip Rosenthal, you know, on the founding team as well, and he has a tremendous depth of clinical usage of proton therapy in a medical setting. He is a medical physicist by training himself as well. So he worked at Harvard Cyclotron Lab, and then he also later on become the chief physicist at Mass General Hospital. So these are just a couple names. We also are fortunate to have some of the advisers, you know, working with us to help us in terms of design. So these are people with very in-depth experience from the Harvard Cyclotron days, and, you know, on the cyclotron, you know, in general in terms of design. And also, sitting in Massachusetts, one of the benefits is a tremendous amount of talent, right?
David Raubach: Yes.
Tina Yu: So our early fundamental, you know, core IP was co-developed with MIT,
David Raubach: Okay.
Tina Yu: and their plasma science and fusion lab. So all these things adding together, so we were able to have — globally, still even today — the smallest, you know, self-shielded, high-energy proton accelerator for medical use.
David Raubach: Okay.
Tina Yu: So this is a very high requirement, because it’s for medical use, it’s not a research or, you know, a national lab research project, where you do it just one by itself, you know, do it once, right? Here it has to have all the commercial characteristics, in terms of controllability, robustness, and, you know, reproducibility, and all that kind of stuff, on a very precision kind of requirement — a lot of the beam characteristics within sub-millimeter, right? So even, you know, earlier stage, you know, on the cyclotron space, a lot of the requirement is a micron kind of precision, right? So these are the things that really kind of bring us off the ground. Then for us the major advancement is we have early believers. We cannot just survive as a technology company, we have to be part of a value added in the community.
Tina Yu: Washington University Barnes-Jewish Hospital was the first sort of a strong backer, willing to commit, you know, use our machine. So we need users, right, and people believed in our design, believed in the future of proton therapy, when we were born, at that time, because the dominant technology has always been those large systems, they’re multi-room, so there were a lot of naysayers — naysayers in terms of whether single room is the future or not, they’re naysayers in terms of whether we can be successful in our development or not. So that’s been a long journey. Obviously we have a lot of investors who supported us, you know, through the process, it was a long, long, and difficult journey, and it took us almost 10 years from the founding of the company to the first patient treatment, in December 2013, you know, led by Dr. Jeff Riley and his team at Wash U Barnes-Jewish Hospital. We’re extremely grateful for this partnership. You know, that’s our other chapter — first chapter of our corporate development.
Tina Yu: Then we also, you know, further augmented the machine, they added the so-called pencil beam, right, technology, which is a little bit, you know, a more precision way to deliver proton therapy — just to put it a little bit simpler for your audience. Then we have Georgetown University as our first adopter, you know, to have their system. They treated the first patient in March 2018. So these are, you know, early adopters. We wouldn’t be here without all these visionary early adopters who believed in us, believed in what we can do, right? So, moving us forward, and today we’re in another era. We think that, you know, so in 2004 we believe that Mevion clearly championed this idea of single room proton therapy, right, so that’s the proton therapy era 3.0, right? Then today we’re sort of in an era 4.0, by making it even smaller, right, we miniaturize that even further, we reduce the volume by 80%.
David Raubach: By 80%?
Tina Yu: So that it can fit into a typical Linac vault. And so we call it proton therapy era 4.0. And over that journey, that’s Stanford University, Stanford Healthcare become the first adopter, and being a very strong backer of our technology, because they also believe that, yes, you know, the 3.0 is beautiful, but there’s still many institutions that do not have extra space and all that to house this three-story machine, right, or build a separate structure on it, right? So what we provide here is a truly integrated — everything can fit into a typical Linac room, right? Then, this Linac is 90% plus of how cancer patients are being treated by radiation oncology, radiation, you know, therapy, right? So this is clearly the way how we want to bring this modality to more institutions.
Tina Yu: So after Stanford adopted the machine, we announced it three years ago at ASTRO, and we subsequently have quite a few, you know, other institutions, you know, including NCIs, like University of Nebraska Medical Center, adopting it. Then we also have large community hospitals, like BayCare Health, and also Atlantic Health System, Morristown Hospital, you know, adopting it. Then most recently, we’re extremely proud of having the hospital Loma Linda Medical Center,
David Raubach: That’s amazing.
Tina Yu: You know, adopting this technology to become their chapter 2.0, right? So all these forces adding together, you know, demonstrate, you know, the path we’re on, which is to provide, you know, sort of a clinical system to really deliver superior treatment capability, right, using proton therapy, at the same time, you know, without — I mean — miniaturizing this, you know, footprint and make it much more available. The — not only without compromise of the functionality — we believe, through the next, I think, years, we are going to demonstrate there are certain indications we can show a lot of superiority of treating it, you know, using this further miniaturized machine, because the major difference of the treatment, you know, compared to conventional treatment, is the patients are not treated in supine position, they’re not laying on the couch or laying on a bed anymore, right, but that has been the paradigm of the last 50 years, right? Moving forward, we’re going to treat patients upright.
David Raubach: Yeah?
Tina Yu: Right, which is being made possible by our excellent partner, Leo Cancer Care. You — I know you’re also going to interview their visionary leader, you know, Stephen Towe, right? So I think that that’s a great partnership. That’s why I said, over again, we are a player, and a contributor, and also a beneficiary of this ecosystem, right? We need the partners to work with us. We also have a partner, like — they do treatment planning systems, right — RaySearch, you know, Johan Löf has been their leader, you know, and has done a tremendous amount of work, yeah, to make proton therapy — to do the treatment system so that the best physics can be utilized and translate into medicine, right? Then we also have a partner like CQ Medical, so they support us with all these positioning tools, so that we can, you know, make patients more comfortable, right, and they can be treated, you know, with higher precision. That’s a lot of, you know, requirement to do that — those ways. So I think this is a very interesting era, and that’s why, you know, this ASTRO is super important to us.
David Raubach: Yeah, and congratulations, you guys had a big announcement that you received FDA approval for the Mevion FIT system, which is this compact proton therapy system that, with the cyclotron, and with the patient positioner you talked about, the chair, or treating patients upright, all of that can fit into a standard linear accelerator vault. And you mentioned earlier that there’s about 4,000 linear accelerator vaults in the United States. So it really does open up a market for proton therapy that maybe didn’t exist 3 or 4 or 5 years ago. I do have a question for you though on this. You know, when Mevion first came out with this idea of doing a single room proton center, there was naysayers.
Tina Yu: Mhm.
David Raubach: There’s people that maybe are questioning the viability of treating patients in an upright system. There’s — we can use the word naysayers still. There are still naysayers, always, as a company becomes a trailblazer. There are always naysayers. You guys are used to having to address naysayers, and of course Mevion ended up proving out that for many institutions a single room proton center was actually the best option. It wasn’t even just an option, it was the best option. So what do you say to people that maybe are questioning whether or not patients can get treated in the upright position, or that this whole paradigm shift for how we think about delivering radiation can work?
Tina Yu: Yeah, I think there are obviously a lot of technical reasons we can go into, in terms of why we believe this treatment has a lot of advantages, right?
David Raubach: Yeah.
Tina Yu: I want to kind of maybe address this question from a little bit different angle, not from the technical angle. I know Stephen Towe can also address that, you know, very well, and with also the clinician support. The — I think from my perspective, in my entire career, you know, sort of investing, now today leading innovative companies, you know, sort of addressing the concerns of naysayers has always been part of the strength of let us moving forward, right? So the naysayers have a lot of questions about, hey, whether pediatrics can be treated, right, then how do we deal with motion, right, and all these things — we have thought about that all along, for years, right, if not decades, right? We did not take that step very lightly. We have a lot of solutions, I think, to preempt all these questions, so then we also want to hear other questions — have we got designs we have not addressed — so I want to talk to these naysayers, understand their concerns, and design experiments to address that, right?
Tina Yu: I myself actually, you know, have the pleasure of converting some naysayers, I think, you know, say, for example, Dr. Charles Enke, the chairman of University of Nebraska Medical Center, you know, 2020, when we launched the product, you know, for the S250 FIT, for the upright, you know, treatment modality — he wasn’t a believer, he was not a believer, he had a lot of concerns, right? At that time he was looking at our gantry based system. However, he is the first group to come to Littleton, Massachusetts, our headquarters, to see it firsthand, how we designed it, how we address these questions he had in his mind. He wants to treat peds. We want to support ped treatment as well. Stanford wants to support ped treatment as well, right? You know, Dr. Enke has done a lot of work, you know, to show how peds can be treated on this upright system. Then he also had a lot of questions about how we address motion, right, especially when patients are rotating, right?
David Raubach: Right.
Tina Yu: So we showed him all the lasers, and we’re using the 2D X-rays to make clinicians be comfortable in that environment. So a month after his visit, he was actually the first — he wrote me an email, he said, “Tina, I’m going to bet my retirement savings on the success of this product.”
David Raubach: Yeah.
Tina Yu: I was like, I really feel flattered, I was like, hey, you are the neighbor of the Sage of Omaha,
David Raubach: Yeah.
Tina Yu: I don’t think I’m qualified to advise you how you spend your retirement savings, right? But I remember what Warren Buffett always say — invest in US, never bet against America.
David Raubach: Oh, right.
Tina Yu: Okay, so, sort of working with Mevion, a US-based company,
David Raubach: Yeah.
Tina Yu: from my perspective is investing US. And I want to say, you know, never bet against the ingenuity of the Mevion engineers, we will figure out a way, right, through the process. The product won’t be perfect right from day one, but it’s a continuous, you know, engineering process, evolution of excellence. So I have all the confidence we will address all these clinical concerns you guys raised, and we’re working very closely with our partners to do that, one step at a time, and get the first patient treated, hopefully by year end, at Stanford. That’s what they announced at their symposium, and then we get more patients treated, we look at all different conditions, right? So in the end, we are a solution, you know, provider. I truly believe it is the culture of being able to, and the dare to think out of the box, making impossible possible, right? The strive for excellence, these core characteristics of Mevion have brought us to today, right? Then it’s going to guide us for the future decades, to bring this better, you know, proton therapy, you know, superior proton therapy to more cancer patients.
David Raubach: Well, that’s great, and I really like the approach that you just described there, which is you actually welcome the feedback and commentary from naysayers, or people that are questioning how or why this system or this setup can work, because it’s going to make the system better, ultimately answering all of those questions.
Tina Yu: It’s part of the ecosystem. Even the naysayers, it’s part of the value add, right? But we have seen a tremendous amount of conversion from the bystander naysayers, right, to join this, then let’s build it together, right? So there are quite a few other, you know, major institutions that are really working with us, trying to be problem solvers, because the fundamental message is so strong. If we can bring proton therapy in a typical Linac room, right, then we can make this modality much more usable, right? It’s not going to be a corner situation like today, right? So we want it to be closer to patients. So all clinicians who want to use proton therapy can have those, too, right? It’s not going to be, you know, all cancer patients being treated by proton, probably not needed, right? But there is a very sizable portion of cancer patients that can materially benefit from this modality. This is what we strive for. This — we’re not here yet, we’re not here even in the US. Then globally the situation is even more, you know…
David Raubach: So, talk to me a little bit — well, and I actually, I do want to say this, I’m a believer in upright treatment, because I’ve seen it firsthand. The Oklahoma Proton Center, which is where I work most of the time, had a chair, and we treated patients in a chair. It was, I think, maybe, in terms of modern proton 2.0 proton therapy, I think it was the first chair that was developed, and then the second iteration of that chair ended up getting installed at the facility in Chicago, the ProCure Center in Chicago, and to this day they still treat patients upright. So it absolutely can be done. Now, we didn’t have all of the fancy imaging, and the vertical CT, and all the alignment, and everything, and of course pencil beam scanning, and all of the great things that you guys have incorporated into your system. But it certainly can be done.
David Raubach: And the most important thing with the whole endeavor is it really is about creating more access for patients. That’s the whole point of doing it — is, even if you say, well, we’re going to be able to treat 95% of the patients that you could treat on a gantry, maybe there’s a few patients that you can’t treat on a gantry, those are — 95% of patients that in a particular market may otherwise not have access to protons, at a place like Stanford that maybe wouldn’t have been able to install a gantry based system, cost, size constraints, permitting, whatever it is, now they’ve created access for patients to proton therapy.
Tina Yu: So yeah, I — we want to acknowledge all these early efforts you guys are doing, you guys did, and the Northwestern did, right, that’s inspiration, right? We also see some of the drawbacks of that treatment, right, so what we can improve on. So I think all — most innovation doesn’t come out of seeing air, they come from the past experience — what you guys did, the pioneering work you guys did, is really paving the road for us to design this product. You know, we work with our partner Leo Cancer Care, because of their ingenuity, the design they can do, the most advanced robotics technology, bring us to the table, right, so that we can control these motions and all that at a very high precision, millimeter kind of precision, which is very difficult to do, right, say 10 or 20 years ago. So these are the things we kind of benefit from, and we’re very much open-minded and look forward to other new ideas, new technology, especially with AI and all that, to bring to the table, then we maybe can do it even faster, easier, right, at an even lower cost. So we’re, you know, I think this is, you know, a great time for innovators.
David Raubach: Yeah, and I’ve got a question for you that I’ve always wondered — where did the name Mevion come from?
Tina Yu: Oh, that’s a great question. We use that to test people, I mean, it’s part of our interview questions for people who interview for physics or engineering related jobs, they say, hey, can you figure out what Mevion really mean?
David Raubach: Right?
Tina Yu: I have a guess. Obviously it’s a, you know, made-up word.
David Raubach: Yeah.
Tina Yu: Maybe tell me your guess.
David Raubach: Well, the first thing that comes to mind, and I may be way off on this, but M-E-V, mega electron volt, and then I-O-N, ion.
Tina Yu: Yeah, you’re hired.
David Raubach: Okay. All right. Good.
Tina Yu: That’s the test.
David Raubach: I thought that there was maybe like a merging of those two.
Tina Yu: Yes, it is.
David Raubach: Did somebody — does — is there a person that gets credit for coming up with that?
Tina Yu: Yeah, I think it’s probably Lionel Bouchet. He is our senior VP of commercial success,
David Raubach: Okay.
Tina Yu: and he was on the marketing team at that time, but, you know, you see how we kind of look at the space, you know, from a more physics kind of perspective, he was a medical physicist by training before. So that’s great, that’s a fun part working at Mevion, you know, that’s all the clever things you kind of can appreciate in life.
David Raubach: So, tell us what’s happening with the Chinese market and proton therapy. That’s not something that we hear a lot about here in the United States, but I know it’s near and dear to your heart. What’s happening in China with proton therapy?
Tina Yu: Yeah, I think this is, you know, obviously a huge population, underserved market, and, you know, proton therapy was introduced to that market much later than any other large major markets, say Europe, Japan, then so that represents today one of our fastest growing markets, you know, because of market demand. So I think with the economic — you know, proton therapy in the past, you know, with articles, you know, writing about it, has always been very unequal in terms of distribution, then it’s strongly correlated with economic development, okay, at the country level, at the state level, even sometimes at the city level. So there were studies being done, looking at that, right? So I think China market today, you know, has probably close to a dozen, you know, very active projects,
David Raubach: Okay.
Tina Yu: working on. Yeah, it’s going to be, you know, the government just issued something like 65 licenses.
David Raubach: Oh wow.
Tina Yu: And that’s, you know, essentially proton therapy, heavy ion, and all that. So that’s, you know, a very vibrant market, and I think that for the next 5 to 10 years it’s going to be a very significant market.
David Raubach: Yeah.
Tina Yu: Contributing to many more patients getting treated. And the China market, you know, we have our first machine in China installed at an elite hospital called Tongji Hospital, in Wuhan City,
David Raubach: Okay.
Tina Yu: in the Hubei province, and they started treating December last year, 2024,
David Raubach: Okay.
Tina Yu: so over the first only eight months, they actually treated more than 200 patients across a variety of indications, from kids as young as six years old, to, you know, older adults of 80 plus, right, so very broad age population, a very broad indication, you know, mix, like head and neck, these extremely complex cases, and the CNS, CSI, lung, breast, you know, prostate. So I was very, extremely proud of that customer, and we were able to provide more than 99% uptime, you know, for that machine overseas. So that’s, you know, a great, you know, kudos to our team, especially the field service team, you know, running that site, you know, from the US and with a lot of local support from our China team. So that’s a great outcome from our perspective, but we see many more, and I’m actually going, next month, to China for another rigging event — rigging ceremony — for a top-five hospital in Chongqing.
David Raubach: Okay.
Tina Yu: And so, Chongqing Tumor Hospital. So we have a couple more, you know, obviously installing at various stages in China. So that’s a very exciting market, with a large patient population. So for us, it’ll also drive us in terms of our product development roadmap, about how do we treat it more efficiently, and how do we, you know, educate the market, when physicists, dosimetrists, including physicians, are sort of — their understanding on proton therapy, in terms of experts, is not as abundant as markets like the US, with 60 years of history, right, treating. So those are the material challenges we are facing, but that’s also opportunities for vendors like us to bring value to the table, in terms of training courses, and also international collaboration.
Tina Yu: For example, our physicians at Chongqing Hospital were being sent over to Penn Medicine, they have a fantastic training program, right, although they didn’t use my machine yet, but they have, you know, decades of experience, you know, treating with proton, also a very comprehensive training program for physicians and also for other supporting staff. So we sent them over there, they felt like it’s a great learning course that helped a lot. Then they kind of brought the message back to China, you know, feeding the local community. So I think we’re going to do more, right, we’re going to also group our customers together, then providing better, you know, training opportunities. One of the — I mean, one of the major obstacles with proton therapy training from a vendor perspective is, for a typical gantry based system, we do not have a gantry in the factory. No vendor has that in the factory, comparing to any other medical equipment, right, so it’s just too large to put it together.
Tina Yu: Then right now, with the FIT system, we have a prototype, you know, from start to beginning, you know, sort of full workflow, you know, in our factory. So we feel like, you know, with this product line, we can do even better in terms of training on the machine, how to use it. Then, because for this sector, which I think rests on its precision, right, rest on its deep understanding about the medicine and the physics, the interplay of that, right, so training is an integral part of it, then we cannot afford mistakes to be made, right, on patients.
David Raubach: So are you selling the FIT system internationally, or is that just a US product right now?
Tina Yu: Right now, you know, all our announced customers are in the US. We clearly are looking for international expansion opportunities, and we actually are in the process of registering this product in EU for the CE mark.
David Raubach: Okay.
Tina Yu: So there’s still some regulatory approvals that we need to get through — working process and all that. And also many international countries have their own regulatory, you know, bodies to govern this machine. And one of the ecosystem, you know, I said about, I do want to add, is the open-minded nature of the regulators, the regulatory ecosystem we live in — we are very fortunate to be a US-based company with a very open-minded FDA, the regulatory body. When they look at the product, when they look at our more than 8,000-page submission document, they are extremely open-minded, they work with us, they ask us to do, you know, sort of a modular submission before that, you know, try to work with the company, work with the innovators, right, try to bring the best technology, you know, to the market, to the patients, that’s their mission. So we clearly benefit from that, right?
David Raubach: So what they say is what they did?
Tina Yu: Yeah, I think that I cannot thank them enough for the collaborative nature of that review, and addressing the questions, and giving us the opportunity to address the questions. I mean, we have been, you know, working outside of the US in many other countries — I mean, I think not all regulators are the same, you know, they may have the same heart, right, but they may not have the same practice. So this is really, you know, the best country, you know, for innovation, you know, for innovative medical adoption, and I think let’s keep that, you know, ecosystem thriving, and, you know, we all benefit from it.
David Raubach: So one of the things that you guys — you’ve just hired a new marketing director, a friend of ours, Fern, who’s fantastic, coming from Penn. And I think one of the things that you’ve talked about, and she’s talked about, is this vision for how Mevion is going to support customers operationally beyond just the technology, beyond just the system itself. So talk a little bit about how you want to partner with and support customers in maybe a different way than has existed historically with equipment vendors.
Tina Yu: Yeah, that’s a great question. We — in the end, customer success is our success, right, we cannot live in a vacuum. The customer success is being measured on a lot of parameters, right — there, you know, first, and I believe for any center, the most important parameter is, can they treat the reasonable number of patients within reasonable hours, right, for that operation to be running. Then after that there’s clearly, you know, research opportunities, there’s talent, you know, attraction, there’s other halo effects, and all that measure a proton center’s success.
Tina Yu: To get, you know, a reasonable, you know, number of patients, you know, in the center, today, even in the US environment, there’s still reimbursement challenges, right, with proton therapy, there’s still insurance companies, you know, that need to be better educated on what proton therapy can bring to the table. In the end, this modality saves the total cost of the system over a long period of years, right, it’s not a cost center, it’s actually a value provider. So that message may or may not be agreed with by all insurance companies as yet, right? So these are the things we have to work with our partners, those medical institutions, together, so that the patient rejection rate should be lower, much lower, right? Then, I think, you know, say, for example, Dr. Steve Frank’s recent article about the benefit proton therapy brings to head and neck patients, right, it’s a tremendous amount, especially over a long duration of time, right, in terms of overall survival benefit, in terms of much reduced, you know, side effects, and the cost of treating those side effects, right? So there’s a tremendous amount of, you know, human value to it, and also economic value to it as well.
Tina Yu: So how do we, you know, communicate all these messages to our insurance companies, help all our, you know, our proton centers to be able to get the patients they want to treat. Then today, you know, getting reimbursed or not is one thing, the other thing is a timely reimbursement, right? Sometimes most patients cannot wait, many cancers cannot wait, right? So if you ask me to wait for four to six, you know, weeks, a lot of patients just don’t have that luxury to do that. So we need to, you know, prime the system better. I think Fern, as you mentioned, right, she worked at, you know, Penn Medicine for years, and has, you know, built their program very successfully, right, you know, Penn Medicine has been a beacon in our community, right, for their leadership in proton therapy, and bringing more proton therapy to their main center and also their satellite sites as well, right? So that’s a great amount of achievement.
Tina Yu: How do we, you know, sort of copy-paste that achievement to many other centers, because not all centers have this — the staffing, the depth of what Penn Medicine has. So as vendors, what we want to do is bring the best practices to all the other centers, so that we can make all the other proton centers, especially our customer centers, more successful.
David Raubach: Yeah, I love that. So just a couple more questions, Tina — what are some of the exciting things on the horizon for Mevion? What are — you had the big announcement about the FIT system — what’s next, over the subsequent two, three, five years, that you can talk about? I know there’s probably some proprietary stuff, but what are you most excited about, from a technology standpoint, with Mevion going forward?
Tina Yu: Yeah, I think 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 that platform, and that platform is still evolving — you know, we can treat faster, with, you know, even better integration about some of the other tools. Then we also have the FIT platform, with patients, you know, treated upright, right, that’s a more nascent platform, that needs a lot more R&D investment, and working closely with our, you know, medical institutions, our partners, and, you know, after the first patient treatment, clearly we are having, you know, a lot of work to be done, you know, ahead of us, to realize all these things we think are really ahead of us. First is the breadth of indications we can treat within this new platform, then the second is an efficient workflow, right?
David Raubach: Yeah.
Tina Yu: Then third is the — the superior treatment plan quality. Yeah, right? So we are already doing all the early work as we speak right now, but for the next, I think, two to three years, those would be demonstrated — you know, demonstrated not only just on paper, but demonstrated in patients, and all the studies we need to work on together. In addition, there’s a lot of, with AI, you know, really empowering this innovative economy we live in. There are many other tools in the past we looked at, they would not bring a so-called medical benefit, at least to the degree we can appreciate, to the medical world, as yet. Today we’re revisiting a lot of new technology platforms, in terms of imaging, in terms of innovation and integration and all that.
Tina Yu: Then we believe, in the next, at least within the next five years, we will be able to bring some of these new changes to the world, to be integrated on our platform, so that proton therapy would be much easier to use, right? And today this is still, you know, a technology that needs a lot of training, right, which I said before, but down the road we want it to be as simple as possible, so that we can deploy to many more institutions, to many more countries — maybe talent is a, you know, a limiting factor.
David Raubach: Yeah. Right. So, last question — what are you personally most proud of over the last five years? What’s something — what does Tina Yu say, you know what, I can’t believe that I did this, or accomplished this, or this was very rewarding, or this just makes me feel good knowing that I was part of — what? What are you proud of?
Tina Yu: There are many proud moments, you know, in my last five years, and it can be a few, it doesn’t just have to be one. So, you know, initially I do want to say the FDA clearance of, you know, our newest baby, the S250 FIT, that new product. Yeah, I don’t think people appreciate the fact that that’s many, many years of work. Yeah, the project itself took three-plus years, but in reality it built on our two decades of innovative work, right? So the team we built, and all that, that’s clearly one of the high moments. I think, more importantly, it’s the human touch, when I see the patients, you know, like a Grace Eline, and talking to her mom, you know, looking at the difference that makes, and also for kids who cannot get this, right, some of the side effects they carry, you know, which is going to be a burden to the family, not only to the family, but to society — these are the things we can avoid, right?
Tina Yu: So those are the moments that give me — I see, hey, because last time when we had the Huntsman Cancer Institute patient coming over, we said, yes, this is, you know, getting cancer is unfortunate, but this boy is fortunate to be treated by proton therapy. However, our opening was delayed by at least three months — if we had opened three months earlier, more patients like him, right, could be treated with this modality. So that’s what keeps us driving, we have to run, we cannot just, you know, stall, right, so we have to run. So for me, those are the sort of the best moments — is you truly feel like, hey, this is not something just on the wall, on a piece of paper, right? It’s something with all the flesh and blood, you know, you can feel and you can touch. It warms your heart. It warms my heart, warm all my employees’ hearts, right? So I think that we are collectively, as a team, and living in this great ecosystem, collectively together, making a difference in the world.
David Raubach: Yeah. 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, it’s — we’re changing lives, and we’re making a difference for people that are going through something that’s really really difficult. And for it sounds like for you, and 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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