The Mayo Clinic is betting $370 million on two treatment centers—one at the health care provider's headquarters in Rochester ,MN and the other at its Phoenix campus—that will provide proton beam therapy as an alternative to X-ray radiation, which has been used for decades to treat tumors.
There are approximately thirty centers in the world that offer proton beam therapy, but the only facilities in the United States to offer it currently are at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and Loma Linda University Medical Center. Results from these centers are partly responsible for encouraging the Mayo Clinic to take this initiative.
Each of the Clinic's new treatment centers, estimated to be about 100,000 square feet in size, will feature four proton beam treatment rooms each. Each proton beam requires a gigantic 190-ton mechanical apparatus with a 20-ton magnet in order to work. They are expected to be up and running by 2015.
However, despite the fact that proton beam therapy has not proven itself fully more beneficial than X-ray radiation, officials at the Mayo Clinic feel confident about moving forward with the technology because of the benefits it does provide—more precision in killing hard-to-reach tumors with significantly less damage to the surrounding tissue than in X-ray radiation, as well as other health problems that have been known to arise as a consequence of that radiation, from secondary cancers to organ toxicity and more.
Further Reading
Loma Linda's Proton Therapy and Treatment Center
MD Anderson Proton Therapy Center
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