Inventing the CyberKnife
Adler earned his AB and MD at Harvard, trained in neurosurgery in Boston, and did a radiosurgery fellowship at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm under Lars Leksell. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1987.1,2
He invented the CyberKnife, a robotic system that aims radiation at tumors using image guidance, and founded Accuray to sell it. He was Accuray's CEO from 1999 to 2002. Accuray says more than two million patients have been treated with its technology.2,1
In 2009 he launched Cureus, an open-access medical journal that Springer Nature bought in 2022, and in 2025 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.1
ZAP Surgical
Adler founded ZAP in 2014 to build a radiosurgery system that needs no concrete vault. ZAP-X was FDA cleared in 2017, and ZAP shipped its 50th system in 2026, with nearly 10,000 patients treated.1,3
On October 19, 2026, ZAP announced $36 million led by Catalio Capital Management. Adler said scaling noninvasive therapy to tens of millions of patients will require strong, mission-aligned partners.3
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Photo: ZAP Surgical, About.
