Doctors at Penn Medicine symposium praise proton radiation as a cancer treatment
Mar 9th, 2008 by admin
URL: http://palmbeachdailynews.com/news/content/news/UPenn0309.html
By DAVID ROGERS
Daily News Staff Writer
Sunday, March 09, 2008
Sometimes it takes a really big machine to produce thousands of small miracles.
Next year, a 220-ton particle accelerator — shipped from Belgium in January — will go online at the University of Pennsylvania’s Abramson Cancer Center. When opened, the Roberts Proton Therapy Center will be the sixth such facility in the country, the only one in the mid-Atlantic region and the largest in the world.
Most important to cancer patients, the massive device will be the driving engine for five treatment rooms — where oncologists will use proton radiation to treat 3,000 cases of cancer a year. Traditional radiation therapy goes through a tumor, damaging normal tissue behind it, according to the proton therapy center director, Dr. Stephen Hahn.
“It’s estimated there is about a 50 to 70 percent reduction in radiation doses to normal tissue with protons,” Hahn said before a Penn Medicine symposium Tuesday at The Colony. “We expect there will be a lot of reductions in normal side effects. Patients will benefit from just that alone. But you can imagine, if we can give (a reduced) dose to normal tissue, we should be able to increase the dose to tumors and potentially cure more tumors with radiation,” Hahn said.
The proton therapy center will be connected to the 360,000-square-foot Perelman Center for Advance Medicine. Ray and Ruth Perelman of Philadelphia and Palm Beach provided the $25 million lead gift for the outpatient facility, which uses a team-based approach to cancer diagnosis, treatment and prevention at a single site, according to Dr. Craig Thompson, director of the Abramson Cancer Center.
“That really allows us to make a patient-centric form of care that really doesn’t exist,” Thompson said. “Most of the time when people are diagnosed with cancer, they run from physician’s office to physician’s office. Here we have all the services in one place.” The Perelman Center is set to open later this year.
According to Penn Medicine, the proton therapy center will be the first in the world located at a top academic medical center.
Vaccines for cancer
Dr. Carl June said Penn researchers are investigating vaccines for leukemia, myeloma and other cancers. Penn Medicine is supplying white blood cells to the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa for a human trial of a potential vaccine for lung cancer. That trial started this month, June said.
The first successful cancer vaccine is Merck’s Gardasil, which can protect women from acquiring the two types of the sexually transmitted human papilloma virus (HPV) responsible for most cases of cervical cancer.
“Right now, the major reason people die from cancers is not because you can’t control the initial tumor. It’s that cancer spreads or metastasizes and becomes resistant to chemotherapy,” June said. “So where vaccines like this will have a real impact is to prevent that metastatic spreading from occurring, that chemotherapy and surgery can’t deal with. So I think it will be used in conjunction with surgery and radiation therapy and prevent reoccurrences.”
Private dollars important
June and Thompson emphasized the importance of private philanthropy in supporting emerging research. Thompson thanked the Perelmans for their support.
“That lead gift allowed us not only to start the project, but more importantly it gave confidence to a lot of other people in the Philadelphia area that this project would be seen through to the end and join in philanthropy. They are really the philanthropic leaders of our community and so we are very indebted to them.”
The cost of constructing and equipping the Perelman Center and the Roberts Proton Therapy Center is about $450 million, Thompson said.
