ABOUT PROTON THERAPY
Nearly 50,000 cancer patients worldwide have taken advantage of the technology to effectively treat most common types of solid tumor cancers, including head and neck, prostate, breast, lung, colorectal and rain tumors. Proton therapy's ability to precisely target tumors makes it ideal for treating tumors near vital organs, especially in children. It has been shown to reduce normal tissue damage, side effects and to lessen the probability of secondary tumors later in life.

In 1961, the Harvard Cyclotron Laboratory at Harvard University in Boston began treating patients with proton therapy. Advances in imaging technology such as CT, MRI and PET scans, helped researchers to better diagnose and visualize tumors and made proton therapy a more practical treatment option. The first hospital-based proton treatment center in the United States was built in 1990 at Loma Linda University Medical Center in Loma Linda, Calif.
In the United States, proton therapy is currently only available in five major academic centers: Midwest Proton Radiotherapy Institute at Indiana University, Bloomington, Ind.; Frances H. Burr Proton Therapy Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston (affiliated with Harvard Medical School); The Proton Therapy Center at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center at University of Texas, Houston; Loma Linda University Medical Center, in Loma Linda, Calif.; and University of Florida Proton Therapy Institute, Jacksonville, Fla. In Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania's Roberts Proton Therapy Center is scheduled to open in 2009. The Oklahoma ProCure Treatment Center, Oklahoma City, is expected to be operational in 2009.

For more information about proton therapy, read the special report in February's DOTmed Business News.

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