IBA Brand Guidelines: The Louvain-la-Neuve Cyclotron Spin-Off Behind Proteus

A university spin-off in a town built from fields.

IBA, short for Ion Beam Applications, was founded in 1986 in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, by the engineer Yves Jongen. Its roots are in the university. When the French-speaking part of the Catholic University of Louvain moved to a new town built in open fields, the first building to go up, in 1972, was the cyclotron research centre, which Jongen ran. That account comes from a March 2025 seminar in Paris by IBA’s chief executive, Olivier Legrain, written up by La Fabrique de l’industrie and the École de Paris du management; French Wikipedia tells the same story.

In a lecture at CERN in December 1999, Jongen said that in 1985 he and colleagues had designed a new kind of cyclotron for producing medical radioisotopes, and that, while looking for money to build a prototype, the idea took shape of forming a company. Ion Beam Applications was incorporated in 1986 with five employees. The 2025 seminar gives the date as 28 March 1986 and says the firm began with Jongen’s savings and money from institutional investors. French Wikipedia says the prototype was finished at the end of 1986 and that IBA signed four contracts in 1987 and 1988, in Japan, Australia, China and the United States.

The company then widened its range. Jongen told CERN that IBA moved from radioisotope cyclotrons into proton therapy and then into industrial electron beams with the Rhodotron, a design the 2025 seminar says IBA licensed from the French atomic energy agency, the CEA. In the late 1990s, after a hostile takeover attempt, which the seminar attributes to the Canadian company Nordion, the employees formed a holding company and took a majority of the capital. IBA listed on the Brussels stock exchange in 1998; French Wikipedia says demand for the shares was 32 times the offer.

From Boston to the compact Proteus ONE.

Proton therapy made IBA’s name. According to the 2025 seminar, IBA won a 1992 tender against Siemens to supply a proton therapy accelerator to a Harvard hospital; development took about ten years. English Wikipedia says IBA installed its first proton therapy equipment at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston in 2001, and later at the University of Pennsylvania’s proton centre in 2009.

Today IBA sells two proton therapy systems under the Proteus name: Proteus PLUS, the multi-room installation, and Proteus ONE, a single-room system that the company calls compact. Legrain said in 2025 that the use of superconductivity had cut the diameter of the accelerators for this market from eight metres to three. In 2026 IBA calls itself “the world leader in particle accelerator technology,” and French Wikipedia describes it as the world leader in proton therapy; both are the company’s or the encyclopaedia’s own words.

Proton therapy is one of four lines. IBA’s website lists Dosimetry, which Legrain described in 2025 as quality-assurance tools for checking that a dose is delivered where intended, in proton therapy, conventional radiotherapy and imaging; RadioPharma Solutions, cyclotrons and radiochemistry equipment for making medical isotopes; and Industrial Solutions, electron-beam and X-ray systems used to sterilise medical devices. Jongen’s 1999 lecture said IBA had grown by buying other accelerator makers, including Scanditronix and Radiation Dynamics, and the 2025 seminar says the dosimetry business came from Swedish and German acquisitions. The same account says IBA sold its sterilisation services business in 2004 and its molecular-imaging business in 2012 to concentrate on its core lines.

How the category presents itself.

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.

Still in Louvain-la-Neuve.

IBA keeps its headquarters in Louvain-la-Neuve, where French Wikipedia places several buildings in the town’s science park, including a head office designed by DSW Architects in 1991. English Wikipedia says the company invested in a new logistics and production centre there in 2017. On its website IBA says it is based in Belgium with offices in Canada, China, Germany and the United States, and gives a workforce of more than 2,300.

Ownership is part of the story the company tells. The 2025 seminar says the employees’ holding, first called Le Faisceau belge, later Belgian Anchorage and now Sustainable Anchorage, holds about a fifth of the capital and a larger share of the votes. IBA says it is a certified B Corp. In 2025 Legrain described the group as organised in three parts: clinical applications, combining proton therapy and dosimetry; technologies, combining nuclear medicine and sterilisation; and a strategic holding. French Wikipedia lists Pierre Mottet, the early sales chief, as chairman, with Jongen still on the board.

The campus also carries art. French Wikipedia says that in front of the head office stands Anneau, a ring of Corten steel about six metres across by the Italian sculptor Mauro Staccioli, who chose the circle as a link between form and IBA’s work; outside another building stands Charles Delporte’s bronze Regard de Lumière, placed there in 1993.

For a design guide, IBA shows an engineering company whose story is tied to one place: a cyclotron centre that was the first building in a new university town, and a head office with a steel ring by Staccioli at the door. Compare Mevion, another name in proton therapy, and Elekta, a European radiotherapy company. For this guide we use a deep green, a rust and a pale mist with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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