In the early 1990s, UW-Madison professors Thomas ‘Rock’ Mackie and Paul Reckwerdt wanted to solve a major problem in cancer therapy — the serious damage to normal tissues and organs caused by standard radiation treatments. That was just a dream back then. Today, their TomoTherapy radiation systems are serving cancer patients around the world. Physicians use this remarkable technology to deliver a precisely configured field of radiation to the tumor while sparing surrounding tissue from harm. The company they founded, TomoTherapy Inc., was acquired by Accuray in 2011.