Stephen Towe Profile: Leo Cancer Care’s Rising Star

Cancer is a horrible disease. It is often dehumanizing and devastating for those who are afflicted and the people who care about them the most in the world.

It is also something Stephen Towe is painfully aware of having seen his beloved father suffer and eventually die from bowel cancer. His diagnosis came when Stephen was a teenager in the midst of studying for his GCSEs and he consequently witnessed first-hand the negatives of both cancer itself and the chemotherapy treatment his father endured.

“I often stayed up with him in the night when he was being sick and struggling to sleep and all those things that cancer brings,” he said.

“I knew even at that point that I wanted to find a way of reducing the pain and process patients have to go through while being treated for cancer.”

LEADING THE WAY

Today, Stephen is Chief Executive Officer of Leo Cancer Care – a trans-Atlantic company developing an upright solution for radiation therapy for a wide range of cancers. Its goal is to make cancer treatment more human, cost-effective and take up less space than the traditional methods, and truly democratize the way it is delivered.

It is his drive, tenacity and willingness to take on tasks he had never done before, such as raising funds, and having found the most dedicated and passionate team who have worked tirelessly to achieve those goals, that Leo Cancer Care is now making major research breakthroughs. It is also in the final stages of achieving licensing for its pioneering method and has secured a total of $60 million from investors across the globe.

CHOOSING THE RIGHT PATH

As one of the brightest students at his high school, his potential to make a change in the world was already shining through. Stephen achieved a total of 14 GCSEs, 11 of them with an A* grade at Paulet High School in his home town of Burton-on-Trent, where he still holds the record for obtaining the highest number of the qualifications. He also achieved top grades in three A-levels.

However, the pernicious, knock-on effect of cancer created a fork in the road and while with his strong academic background, Oxford or Cambridge were very much an option, Stephen chose to go to the more local, Keele University, to enable him to stay closer to home.

“My school wanted me to go to Oxford, but if I had, I would have missed seeing him during his final days. I nearly deferred for a year, but Dad was very keen for me to go to university and not ‘waste a year of my life’, as he described it, waiting for him to die. He died in my first year, just before my 19th birthday.”

The youngest of three children, his Dad was a PE teacher and his mum, who also taught, both worked in the primary sector. From his early years, Stephen was a massive numbers nerd. Unlike many of his contemporaries who dreamed of being a fireman, or an astronaut, he had far more grounded ideas about what he wanted to do when he grew up.

“I can remember telling my mum I wanted to be an accountant, a forensic one investigating fraud,” he laughed. “I’ve always been a bit weird like that and a real geek.”

HEALTH CARE BECKONS

After completing his bachelor’s degree in Maths and Physics, Stephen’s career trajectory became a whole lot clearer. Fuelled by a desire to make a positive change and help make a difference to the lives of cancer sufferers, he went straight into radiation oncology.

He explained: “I was always going to go into health care and my discovery of radiation oncology came from doing physics at uni. That’s when I fully understood the use of physics and radiation accelerators in medicine. I also knew by then I wanted to go into the industry and the product development side of things.”

His first job as a graduate physicist was at the Crawley-based UK headquarters of the global Swedish company Elekta, which develops and produces radiation therapy equipment. He spent two years with them learning all about the radiotherapy business and also made a very good friend who would ultimately lead him to working in Australia.

CROSSING THE GLOBE

His friend moved over there and found a job with an engineering consultancy firm called IDE in Sydney. One of the clients was a research group at the University of Sydney, which had begun to explore ways of delivering radiation therapy by rotating the patient rather than rotating the machine and had set up a company called Nano-X, which was looking for talented people to help realize its product vision.

On a return visit to the UK, he got in touch with Stephen and told him about the work of the research group and that they needed someone like him who really understood the industry side of things.

Stephen explained that the goal of the research group was to reduce the size, cost and complexity associated with radiation therapy and their original way of doing that was to keep the radiation beam pointing vertically downwards and rotate the patient while they were lying down supine.

He said: “However, the difference between academia and industry is that on paper it might be great, but when you have to bring users into it, it has to stand up as a concept as well. The initial feedback from patients was not good.”

Behind the research were Professor Paul Keall and Dr Llana Feain and they had already built a concept machine to rotate the patient in a supine position. Nano-X was established to develop their product ideas and a board of directors was established including Keall’s good friend Rock Mackie, who remains today as Chairman and Co-Founder of Leo Cancer Care.

In 2017, after a couple of interviews with Nano-X, Stephen was offered a job and it didn’t take too much convincing his then wife-to-be, Sophie (Towe), who is now Leo Cancer Care’s Director of Marketing, that she should fly out to sun-drenched Australia with him, even though they had only been together at that point for six months.

IT WAS IN THE STARS

The future of the company must have been written in the stars for Stephen, who was initially commissioned as the Beam Systems Engineering Lead to build an engineering team to design the machine and build out the concept. The name of the company was also changed from Nano-X to Leo Cancer Care largely because an Israeli company developing cold cathode imaging systems had a similar name and thus Dr Feain came up with the idea for naming it Leo Cancer Care after realizing that it was the constellation that came after Cancer.

Stephen said: “We built an early prototype and there was a lot of customer engagement and people were really interested in the general concept, but we really struggled in Australia to access talent and to find funding, as do a lot of Aussie start-ups, and so the company closed at the end of 2018.

“However, at this point I knew I really believed in what we were doing and could see industry was reacting positively, so while I had no idea about raising money, I was prepared to do whatever it takes to make sure the company succeeded.”

Stephen and Sophie, who was now his fiancée, packed up their bags again and went to San Francisco – a major hub for radiation therapy firms – where he began searching in earnest for investors and connecting with anyone he could. While accountancy hadn’t become his career, crunching the numbers was now more of a reality for him.

“I had read an amazing book called Venture Deals on the flight over to California, but raising capital was really not something I was very familiar with as a physicist and I rather naively thought it would be easy, but it was incredibly difficult,” he said.

ROCK STEADIES THE BOAT

Rock Mackie backed Stephen’s fund-raising initiative by agreeing to purchase the original company’s assets and eventually his hard-fought efforts paid off as he managed to secure an initial $5 million from investors around the world.

The rest you might say is history apart from the decision as to where the new iteration of the Leo Cancer Care company would be built.

“There are three major hubs for radiation therapy companies: one of them is the Bay Area of San Francisco, but we knew it was hugely expensive to build a company there,” explained Stephen. “Another is Madison, Wisconsin, where Rock is based and the third big hub is in Crawley here in the UK.

It was decided to locate the US office in Madison and set up another in Crawley where good access to talent could easily be found. That was in 2019 and now Leo Cancer Care employs about 100 people, roughly split between the two sites.

LEAVING A LASTING LEGACY

For Stephen and the legacy of his father’s death, there is only one goal in mind and that’s not to become a company only interested in profit. Success for him is entirely based on the people Leo Cancer Care’s upright solution can help to beat cancer.

He said: “I have never been interested in this company from a financial perspective. There are much easier ways of making money than starting a company. For me, it’s about how many patients’ lives can we impact, to truly deliver a treatment experience that is less daunting and makes people feel less vulnerable, whether that be one patient, or millions.”