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The second treatment room is open and treating patients at the ProCure Proton Therapy Center in Oklahoma City.

Opening the gantry doubles the number of patients and expands the types of tumors the Center can treat with proton therapy, an alternative to X-ray radiation that spares healthy tissue and results in far fewer short- and long-term treatment side effects.

“As each new treatment room opens, our opportunity to help patients who can benefit from proton therapy increases,” said W.C. Goad, M.D., medical director of the Center and a founder of Radiation Medicine Associates (RMA), the radiation oncology practice that provides clinical care to the Center. “The gantry, which can rotate the proton beam 360 degrees around the patient, expands our ability to treat more clinically challenging tumors.”

The Center opened in July and can now treat patients diagnosed with a broader range of tumor types, including more anatomically complex tumors such as base of skull, tumors along the spinal cord and many pediatric cancers. Other tumor types being treated at the
center include head and neck, brain, central nervous system, and prostate, among others.

The final two treatment rooms will open by spring 2010 and the Center will be operating at full capacity by next summer, treating up to 1,500 patients a year. The Center has an affiliation with INTEGRIS Health, the state's largest hospital system.

INTEGRIS's new, state-of-the art Cancer Institute of Oklahoma, located adjacent to the ProCure Center, provides patients with additional medical services that they may need while undergoing proton therapy.

The ProCure Proton Therapy Center in Oklahoma City is the sixth center in the country to provide proton therapy and the first in ProCure's network of centers to provide this advanced radiation therapy to patients with cancer. Currently, construction is under way on a ProCure facility in suburban Chicago and ProCure has centers in development in suburban Detroit, South Florida, Seattle and Somerset, New Jersey.

About 60,000 people worldwide have been treated with protons - more than 30,000 in the U.S. - since it was first used more than 50 years ago. More than 3,200 of the 18,000 Oklahomans diagnosed with cancer this year would be considered candidates for proton
therapy. The treatment has become more widely available as imaging technology has advanced and tumors can be precisely located and defined, which is important with proton therapy.

Source: Business Wire

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