ViewRay Brand Guidelines: MRIdian, a University of Florida Licence & a 2023 Chapter 11

A physicist’s invention, licensed from his university.

ViewRay grew out of a university radiation oncology department. In June 2011 the trade journal HospiMedica reported that the company, then privately held and based in the Cleveland area of Ohio, held an exclusive worldwide licence from the University of Florida in Gainesville for its core technology: a combination of magnetic resonance imaging and radiation therapy in one system. The technology had been invented by the company’s founder, the physicist James F. Dempsey, while he was a member of the university’s radiation oncology faculty, and the journal reported that the university had encouraged him to take his invention to market, after which ViewRay was formed. Dempsey was by then the company’s chief scientific officer.

The occasion for that report was a set of patents. Patents had been issued in the United States and Europe covering both the device and the method of using it, which HospiMedica described as the simultaneous combination of MRI and radioisotope irradiation. At that stage the ViewRay system was a research machine, not for use on patients, and the company was working toward clearance from the US Food and Drug Administration. The director of the University of Florida’s technology licensing office called them “landmark patents.”

The company’s name and its founding pitch point the same way. In Dempsey’s words in 2011, the system was “intended to enable clinicians to see precisely where the radiation is being delivered, as it’s being delivered,” with continuous soft-tissue imaging during treatment. That promise of seeing during treatment ran through what ViewRay later said about its product, and through the tagline that its name still carries today.

MRIdian, from St. Louis to Guildford.

The product took the name MRIdian. In February 2014 Imaging Technology News reported that the ViewRay system was treating patients at the Siteman Cancer Center at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, with stereotactic body radiation therapy for lung cancer among the first treatments. English Wikipedia’s article on image-guided radiation therapy, citing that report, calls it the first clinically active MRI-guided radiation therapy machine.

The first system paired MRI with radioisotope irradiation, as the 2011 patent report described. A later version, the MRIdian Linac, was built around a linear accelerator. In March 2018 the Florida leasing company RAD Technology Medical Systems announced that it had bought two MRIdian Linac systems, which it said were the 50th and 51st units ViewRay had sold; ViewRay’s chief executive at the time, Chris Raanes, spoke of “the milestone of 50 MRIdian systems ordered.”

By 2022 ViewRay was listed on Nasdaq under the ticker VRAY and issued its announcements from Denver. Its standard company description that year said it “designs, manufactures, and markets” the MRIdian system, built on a high-definition MR imaging system that it said had been designed from the ground up for radiation oncology rather than taken from diagnostic radiology. In September 2022 it announced that GenesisCare had ordered two more systems for new centres in Guildford and Birmingham, which ViewRay said would double that network’s United Kingdom count to four, alongside Oxford and London.

The most recent version shown on the website today is the MRIdian A3i. Its product page describes automated workflow steps and contouring tools, tracking of up to three targets across coronal, sagittal and axial planes with automatic beam control, a brain treatment package, and a “parallel” workflow that lets clinicians work at the same time and connect remotely. It quotes Dempsey as chief scientific officer, founder and inventor, and lists the company’s presentations at the ASTRO congress of 2022.

How radiotherapy companies present themselves.

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.

Chapter 11, and a name that carries on.

The business did not survive in its original form. On 17 July 2023 MedTech Dive reported that Denver-based ViewRay had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the US Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware. Its chief executive said in a sworn declaration that inflation and supply-chain disruption had pushed back installations of MRIdian systems and customers’ payment schedules, and the company said it intended to sell all or part of its assets while supporting existing customers. The filing came with a change of chief executive and further job cuts, the publication reported.

The bankruptcy did not keep the company running. In October 2023, writing after the ASTRO meeting in San Diego, the head of the used-equipment dealer Radiology Oncology Systems reported that ViewRay’s chief executive had told customers that all operations would cease on 25 October 2023.

The name has not disappeared. The viewray.com address now forwards to the website of ViewRay Systems, Inc., which carries a 2024 copyright, the line “Visibly Better” and offices in Oakwood Village, Ohio, in Denver and in Milpitas, California. It presents the MRIdian A3i, a map of treatment centres and patient stories, while its leadership and media-kit pages read “Coming Soon.”

For a design guide, ViewRay shows how a medical-technology brand can rest on a single idea — seeing during treatment — carried from the company name to the product name and the tagline. Compare Elekta, whose Unity system is also an MR-linac, and RefleXion, another American start-up that set out to build a new kind of radiotherapy machine. For this guide we use a deep blue, a cool mist and a teal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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