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Proton therapy center chain Procure Treatment Centers Inc. and the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance said Tuesday they've broken ground on what could become the United States' 11th working proton therapy center.

The $160 million, 60,000 square-foot center, dubbed the SCCA Proton Therapy, A ProCure Center, is set to open on the campus of Northwest Hospital & Medical Center in early 2013.



It will be the Pacific Northwest's first such center. Currently, the nearest location for the high-tech cancer treatment is at Loma Linda University Medical Center in southern California.

"It's going be a four treatment room center, and it's expected to treat 1,400 patients annually," Sky Opila, a spokesman for ProCure, told DOTmed News.

Proton therapy is a cancer-fighting technology that uses accelerated particles to destroy tumors. Because it's believed to minimize radiation dose to healthy tissue, it's considered especially useful in treating tricky pediatric brain and spine tumors.

Although the roots of the technology go back to shortly after World War II, the first center to treat patients, Loma Linda, opened in 1990.

Because of the expense involved in buying and housing a proton-accelerating cyclotron or synchrotron, few centers have been built. There are only nine centers operating in the United States and around 21 worldwide.

[Read why there might never be more than 20 or 30 proton therapy centers in the U.S.]

The center will be New York-based ProCure's fourth and one of two it currently has under construction. A $162 million center in Somerset, N.J. is scheduled to open in April of next year. ProCure is also in the preliminary stages of developing a two-room center in Michigan with William Beaumont Hospitals and another center with Boca Raton Radiation Oncology Associates in south Florida.

Other proton therapy centers being built include the $65 million McLaren Proton Therapy Center in Flint, Mich., the $119 million ProVision Trust Proton Therapy Center in Knoxville and the $185 million Scripps Health center in San Diego County.

The new Seattle center features one gantry room, two inclined beam rooms and one fixed beam room, following the model held by ProCure's two other centers in Oklahoma City and Warrenville, Ill. Its cyclotron was developed by Belgian firm, Ion Beam Applications S.A.

The cost of the center, financed by a mix of cash and debt, includes land, building costs, equipment and working capital, Opila said.

ProCure's partner, the 11-year-old nonprofit Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, is a cancer research and treatment center owned by Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, University of Washington Medicine and Seattle Children's.

The SCCA had earlier scrapped its 2006 plans to build a $120 million proton therapy facility with Proton Cancer Centers of America LLC., then affiliated with Hitachi America Ltd. That center would have opened in 2010.

Around 70,000 people in the Pacific Northwest were diagnosed with cancer in 2010, according to American Cancer Society figures provided by ProCure. The group believes at least 12,600 of these patients could be candidates for proton therapy.