SANFORD, Fla. — For many years, Richard Sweat’s company, .decimal, has been producing customized medical devices for cancer treatment.
Now, the company is testing what could be its most transformative innovation yet, a device used for Flash therapy.
“Where patients normally get treated five days a week for four to six weeks,” Sweat said, “with electron flash, they’re going to take those six weeks of daily treatments and compact them down to point two seconds.”
Although the treatment is still in early trials, doctors believe it has enormous potential. Dr. Garrett Pitcher, a medical physicist at Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center, says, “Flash is intensity modulation… It’s a fancy word for tailoring the electron beam to suit the shape of a particular patient’s tumor.”
According to the National Institutes of Health, initial research indicates that Flash therapy might “reduce radiation-induced toxicity in healthy tissues without compromising the anti-cancer effects of treatment compared to conventional radiation therapy.” Pitcher says the clinical work is advancing step by step.
“The very first investigations are kind of on the safer side,” he noted. “Those trials have shown that we are not harming patients. So, now we’re kind of on to step two, where we make sure that the improvements that we expect to see are actually realized.”
If approved, Flash therapy might become available to patients within three to five years.
Click here to download our free news, weather and smart TV apps. And click here to stream Channel 9 Eyewitness News live.
©2025 Cox Media Group
