Elekta Brand Guidelines: Leksell’s Gamma Knife, Philips’ Crawley Linacs & Unity

A neurosurgeon, his son and a frame for the head.

Elekta was founded in 1972 by Lars Leksell, professor of neurosurgery at the Karolinska Institute, and his son Laurent “Larry” Leksell, English and Swedish Wikipedia say, citing Jeremy Ganz’s The History of the Gamma Knife (2014). Its purpose was to commercialise two of the elder Leksell’s inventions: the Leksell Stereotactic System, an arc-shaped frame that locates targets inside the head by coordinates, and the Gamma Knife.

Leksell was already an inventor of instruments. Elekta’s history describes the Leksell Rongeur, a set of flexible neurosurgical pliers that he designed from his experience as a volunteer physician in Finland during the war and that is still in use, before he set up Sweden’s first neurosurgical clinic outside Stockholm at the University Hospital in Lund after 1945.

The research behind them is older than the company. In Elekta’s own history, written with its corporate archive at Stockholm’s Centre for Business History, the stereotactic instrument was first tried in an operation in Lund in 1949. Leksell then worked with the radiation biologist Börje Larsson at the Werner Institute in Uppsala, directing proton beams from a synchrocyclotron at targets located with the frame; the company dates their first such operation to late 1958, and says Swedish newspapers reported it in January 1959.

The Gamma Knife replaced the proton beam with cobalt-60 sources set in a helmet-like steel hemisphere. Elekta says the prototype, nicknamed “Kulan” (the Ball), was built by Motala Verkstad, an engineering works founded in 1822 to equip the Göta Canal, with funding from the Axel Johnson Research Foundation, and was completed in 1967. The helmet was designed for 180 radiation sources, but the company says only 178 were loaded: one channel had not been drilled and another had to be plugged. Because the Stockholm hospital did not yet have permission to handle cobalt-60, the company says, the first Gamma Knife operation took place in November 1967 at the Studsvik research reactor. Wikipedia credits the original device to Leksell, the neurosurgeon Ladislau Steiner and Larsson. Elekta says Motala Verkstad still makes Leksell Gamma Knife systems.

From the brain to the whole body.

For its first two decades Elekta was a neurosurgery company. Its history dates its entry into the United States to 1987 and into Japan to 1988; Wikipedia records that an earlier Gamma Knife had reached the US in 1979, at UCLA, through an arrangement between the American neurosurgeon Robert Wheeler Rand and Leksell.

The company listed on the Stockholm exchange in 1994, and the listing paid for the move that changed it. In November 1996, Elekta says, staff at the Philips radiotherapy division in Crawley, south of London, were told that Elekta had signed a letter of intent to buy their unit; the purchase was completed in early 1997. The division had about 900 people and Elekta about 300, the company says, and it brought Elekta into linear accelerators — a turn, its own history notes, for a firm that had spent years arguing for the Gamma Knife over linacs.

Software and brachytherapy followed. Elekta bought the oncology software company IMPAC Medical Systems in 2005, the Beijing Medical Equipment Institute in 2006 and CMS in 2008, and added the brachytherapy specialist Nucletron in 2011, Wikipedia records, citing the company’s press releases; the planning-software firm ProKnow followed in 2019, and Swedish Wikipedia adds the Finnish digital-health company Kaiku Health in 2020. Its linear accelerators now include Versa HD, launched in 2013, Harmony, launched in 2020, and the Evo CT-linac of 2024. The radiosurgery line continues as the Leksell Gamma Knife Esprit, and its software includes the Monaco planning system, the MOSAIQ oncology information system and Elekta ONE.

The radiotherapy register.

Radiotherapy companies sell machines that most people never see. A linear accelerator sits in a shielded treatment room, often called a bunker, and is bought by hospital physicists, radiation oncologists and administrators rather than by the public. Their brand material is therefore built for a professional audience first, and the patient appears mostly through the treatment room and the people who work in it.

The dominant image is the machine itself: a large, rounded white gantry around a treatment couch, photographed in a calm room with soft lighting and, often, a coloured wall or ceiling panel. Close-ups of the gantry head, the couch and the imaging arms stand in for the engineering inside. The palette that follows is clinical: white and pale grey for the hardware, with one or two blues, teals or purples carried through the logo, the interface and the trade-show stand.

Software has become the second subject. Treatment-planning screens show a scan of the body with the planned dose laid over it as a colour wash, usually running from cool blues at the edges to warm reds and yellows at the centre, and those images are used in brochures as freely as the machines. Physicists and radiation therapists at a console, checking a plan or a quality-assurance result, supply the human scene.

Much of the industry’s visual calendar is set by congresses. The annual meeting of ASTRO, the American Society for Radiation Oncology, and the ESTRO congress in Europe are where companies launch systems, build their stands and publish the photographs and films that then circulate for the year. For a designer, the category is a study in presenting heavy, regulated equipment in a quiet, exact register.

Unity, Utrecht and a listed Stockholm group.

The newest chapter is MR-guided radiotherapy. Elekta Unity combines a 1.5-tesla MRI scanner with a linear accelerator. Health Data Management reported in June 2018 that Elekta had received the CE mark for Unity, that the device had not yet been cleared by the US Food and Drug Administration at that time, and that it came out of the Elekta MR-linac Consortium, which Elekta founded in 2012 with seven centres and its technology partner Philips. Wikipedia adds that the system was developed with UMC Utrecht.

Elekta remains an independent company listed on Nasdaq Stockholm, with its headquarters in Stockholm. Larry Leksell led it as chief executive until 2005 and remains chairman of the board, Wikipedia says; Jakob Just-Bomholt became president and chief executive in September 2025. In 2021 shareholders approved the creation of the Elekta Foundation, which the company says works with governments, NGOs and healthcare providers on access to cancer care in low- and middle-income countries.

The brand voice is warm rather than technical. The website presents the company as “Pioneering Cancer Care Since 1972,” and its about page closes with “We are Elekta. With you. For a world of difference.” Swedish Wikipedia records an earlier slogan, “Hope for everyone dealing with cancer.” The site also publishes Focus, an online magazine of stories from clinics that use its systems.

For a design guide, Elekta shows how a company founded around one Swedish invention grew a brand that now covers the whole radiotherapy department. Compare Varian, the Californian linac maker now part of Siemens Healthineers, and Philips, whose Crawley radiotherapy division became Elekta’s linac business. For this guide we use a deep fjord blue, a cobalt blue and a cool white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Elekta’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.