Re-inventing
Positron Emission Tomography

Our mission is to challenge the status quo in cancer detection by maximizing patient throughput and making PET scans safer for children and other vulnerable groups.

Our CEO has spent the last 40 years conducting R&D in the field of scintillators for fundamental physics and medical imaging.

Our goal is to use metamaterial technologies to drastically improve patient throughput and reduce risk of induced cancer by PET scan radiation, especially for children.

Taking Positron Emission Tomography a leap forward

A positron emission tomography (PET) scan is an imaging modality widely used for the diagnosis, patient staging and treatment follow-up of a number of diseases, such as cancer, cardiovascular and brain degenerative diseases.
A PET scan uses radioactive substances (tracers) which gather in areas of disease prevalence in the body and show up as bright spots. Advances in PET image reconstruction have allowed systems called time-of-flight (TOF) PET to offer higher image quality for more accurate detection of masses and lesions than conventional PET scans.

Multiwave’s know-how & metamaterial design software aims to take this technology to 100ps & subsequently 10ps timing performance.


MetaCrystal

Improving timing performance of Time-of-Flight PET (TOF-PET) scanners is key to increasing their effective sensitivity with the immediate consequence of producing better quality images, dramatically reducing the radiotracer doses injected to the patient and opening PET protocols to new categories of patients (pregnant women, pediatric, neonatal and even fetus examinations).

Standard scintillators are reaching their limits and will not be able to break the 200ps barrier with existing technology. The potential to reach sub 100ps has been demonstrated by Paul Lecoq in published work* funded by an ERC grant while at CERN.

* P. Lecoq, “Pushing the Limits in Time-of-Flight PET Imaging”.
IEEE Trans. On Rad. and Plasma Med. Sci. Vol. 1, N°6, p 473, Nov 2017
R.M. Turtos, S. Gundacker, E. Auffray & P. Lecoq, “Towards a metamaterial approach for fast timing in
PET: experimental proof-of-concept”, 2019 Phys. Med. Biol. in press
https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6560/ab18b3
R.M. Turtos, P. Lecoq et al., “On the use of CdSe scintillating nanoplatelest as time taggers for high-
energy gamma detection”, Submitted to Nature Photonics, March 2019.

Impact & benefits

Care standard & Costs

Reaching or breaking the 100 pico-second CTR in TOF-PET will greatly improve the standard of care and reduce costs to heath systems.

Improved image quality

A TOF-PET scanner targeting 100ps coincidence time resolution (CTR) would more than double the effective sensitivity compared to the best commercially available machine today and be 5 times more sensitive than a PET with no TOF capability (fifteen-fold improvement with CTR of 10ps), opening the way to in-vivo molecular imaging studies at the sub-picomolar level.

Reduce dosage of radioactive substances to patients

Achieving 100pico-seconds CTR will also drastically reduce dosage of radioactive substances. Radiation exposure can be a serious concern for adult and particularly children patients due to the ionizing nature of PET radiation. One PET scan is equivalent to the radiation exposure of 160 transatlantic flights from London to New York. ** Achieving 10ps resolution will reduce the dosage to an equivalent of 1 transatlantic flight.

“Dosage optimization in positron emission tomography: state-of-the-art methods and future prospects”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4620179/

Wider population reach

Every year, about 10 million PET procedures are performed, sometimes combined with CT and MRI. Reducing dosage amounts per PET scan means opening TOF-PET to natal and neo-natal examinations, opening the imaging modality to a much wider population.


Benefits for health systems

A cyclotron produces radiotracers for delivery to hospitals. The radius is limited by the half life of the radioactive dosage. Beyond a 200km radius, the dosage is not sufficient to perform a scan.

Improving crystal design extends the reach of the radiotracer to 500km by requiring lower radioactive dosages per scan.

Timeline
March 2015

Panos & Tryfon found Multiwave Technologies AG (Geneva) to develop metamaterial technologies

June 2016

Partnership with Imperial College London on metamaterial algorithms

September 2017

Partnership with Institut Fresnel and Aix Marseille University on optical metamaterials

November 2017

First published article demonstrating the potential to reach 10ps timing performance in TOF-PET

August 2019

Multiwave Technologies AG spins-off activity on metamaterial applications for positron emission tomography

September 2019

Prof. Paul Lecoq joins as co-CEO to drive research in metamaterial scintillators for radiation detectors. Prof. Lecoq is the head of physics of the European Academy of Sciences and a CERN honorary member

November 2019

Partnership with i3M laboratory, a mixed lab of CSIC and Valencia Polytechnic University in Spain to form a metamaterial lab for time of flight PET applications

February 2020

Mr Konstantinou joins company as Head of R&D

February 2020

Joint patent filed between Multiwave and i3M on metamaterial scintillators for time of flight PET scanners

January 2021

Metacrystal files new patent on photonic crystals for scintillators

Core Team
Prof. Paul Lecoq, PhD
Co-CEO

Paul dedicated his 40-year career to the field of medical physics at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.  His work on particle physics dete...

Read more +
Georgios Konstantinou, PhD
CTO

Georgios joined Multiwave Metacrystal SA as CTO after running his own deep-tech startup, SensYnc, in the field of positron emission tomography. SensYnc was r...

Read more +
Riccardo Latella
Engineer

Riccardo joined Multiwave Metacrystal as a Research and development engineer in 2021 from the German semiconductor manufacturer Infineon Technologies where h...

Read more +

Board of directors
Panos Antonakakis
Co-founder & Chairman

Panos is co-founder and Chairman of Multiwave Technologies AG, a deep-science metamaterial technology company which he co-founded with his brother Tryfon in ...

Read more +
Tryfon Antonakakis
Co-founder & board member

Tryfon is co-founder and ceo of Multiwave Technologies, a deep-tech metamaterial company which he founded with his brother panos in march 2015. Tryfon & ...

Read more +

Scientific board
Jose Maria Benlloch
Scientific advisor

José M. Benlloch is Full Professor (Tenure Research Scientist) at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). He worked in particle detectors at CERN (Gene...

Read more +
Prof. Richard V. Craster
Scientific advisor

Professor Richard V. Craster is the Dean of the Faculty of Natural Sciences at Imperial College London. He is also the director of the CNRS-Imperial “Abraham...

Read more +
Dr. Tarek Hijal
Scientific advisor

Dr Tarek Hijal is director of the division of radiation oncology of McGill University Health Centre and assistant professor in the department of oncology at ...

Read more +

Partnerships