Radiation therapy remains one of the most widely used cancer treatments, but the process of planning each patient’s treatment is still complex, time-intensive and heavily dependent on specialist input.
Lumonus is focused on making that process more consistent and less time-intensive, with a new collaboration announced this week bringing its AI-driven planning and workflow platform into clinical use.
The Sydney-based oncology software company on Wednesday unveiled a collaboration with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) in New York, one of the world’s leading cancer research and treatment centres, to integrate and further develop MSK’s ECHO mathematical optimisation engine within the Lumonus AI platform. The partnership aims to target one of the most technically demanding parts of cancer care: treatment planning.
The agreement brings together MSK’s established optimisation technology with Lumonus’ broader software platform, which focuses on automating clinical workflows across radiation oncology.
Tackling a persistent bottleneck
Planning a course of radiation therapy involves balancing competing priorities — delivering a high enough dose to treat the tumour while limiting exposure to surrounding healthy tissue.
That process is guided by detailed clinical rules and constraints, and can take hours of iteration for each patient.
ECHO, developed at MSK over nearly a decade, approaches this challenge through mathematical optimisation. It uses constraint-based modelling to generate treatment plans that meet defined clinical criteria, drawing on years of institutional research and validation.
Lumonus is aiming to extend that capability by embedding it within its platform, which is designed to manage the broader planning workflow — from data inputs through to review and documentation.
Rather than operating as a standalone tool, the goal is to integrate optimisation more directly into day-to-day clinical processes.
From capability to clinical use
Automated planning has been a focus area in radiation oncology for years, but translating it into routine use has proven uneven.
Consistency remains a key issue. Generating a plan is one step; ensuring that it reliably aligns with physician intent across different cases and clinical settings is another.
Lumonus’ approach centres on reducing that variability by combining optimisation with workflow automation — standardising how plans are generated, reviewed and refined within a single system.
The collaboration with MSK is expected to support that effort through continued joint development and clinical input, helping refine how the technology performs in real-world settings.
A global collaboration with local roots
Lumonus operates across the US, Europe and Australia, reflecting a broader trend among Australian healthtech companies building platforms for international markets from an early stage.
Partnerships with institutions like MSK — widely regarded as a leader in cancer research and clinical care — can play an important role in that strategy, providing both technical validation and access to high-quality clinical environments.
The Lumonus-GSK partnership also provides another example of locally connected companies participating in specialised segments of global healthcare, particularly in software-driven areas where geographic boundaries are less limiting.
What comes next
The immediate focus will be on integrating ECHO into the Lumonus platform and advancing joint research efforts.
Longer term, the key measure will be adoption — whether the combined system can deliver consistent, high-quality treatment plans in routine clinical use while reducing the time and effort required from clinicians.
If that can be demonstrated, it would mark a meaningful step forward for automation in radiation oncology — a field where incremental improvements in planning can have direct implications for both patient outcomes and clinical efficiency.
For now, the MSK collaboration gives Lumonus a credible pathway to test that proposition at scale.