State-of-the-art cancer fighting tool will begin saving lives this month
Tuesday, 03 August 2010 11:52
Tweet
The $225 million Hampton University Proton Therapy Institute, or HUPTI, one of the world's newest and most innovative centers for treating cancer, will begin treating its first patients later this month.The 98,000-square-foot center at 40 Enterprise Parkway will be the first such facility in both Virginia and the mid-Atlantic region, only the eighth in the United States – and, to date, the largest freestanding center in the world. After becoming fully operational by December 2011, the institute expects to see more than 2,000 patients a year, and specialize in prostate, breast, lung, eye and pediatric cancers that have not metastasized.
“It's great medicine. I truly believe it is going to relieve human misery and save a lot of lives,” Hampton University President William R. Harvey recently told a lunch gathering of the Hampton Roads Chapter of the Conference of Minority Public Administrators, or COMPA.
Harvey was introduced by Hampton's Interim Assistant City Manager James A. Gray, who received his bachelor's of science from Hampton University. “The potential for this proton therapy institute is nothing short of remarkable and we are very fortunate to have it right here in the Hampton Roads region and available to us,” Gray told the COMPA gathering.
The benefits, according to the National Association for Proton Therapy, is that unlike other forms of radiation therapy there are only minimal side effects of the type that can make patients feel ill or damage surrounding tissues and organs.
 |
|
| Watch a video about the institute and proton therapy from WHRO |
Keppel, who is the HUPTI's scientific and technical director, also directs Hampton University's Center for Advanced Medical Instrumentation as well as being a staff scientist at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in nearby Newport News.
Explaining the importance of having a proton therapy center in Virginia, Harvey noted statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and the National Cancer Institute that show that one out of every three Virginians will develop some form of cancer and that Hampton Roads leads the nation in prostate cancer deaths.
In addition to the tremendous medical potential of proton therapy, Harvey said, the HUPTI will benefit the city of Hampton as “an economic driver.” That's because many of the patients and their families will be coming from outside Hampton Roads, even from other countries, and staying in hotels, eating out and shopping here during proton treatment periods.
Taxes from all those stays, meals and local shopping, along with revenue from related development, will generate nearly $1 million a year for the city, according to an analysis from the Hampton Economic Development Department. The department director, James Eason, has deemed HUPTI the second-largest economic development project in Hampton's history, surpassed only by the new $276 million Peninsula Town Center.
Harvey has praised Hampton's support for the HUPTI, which will employ about 130 people. The city donated two 5.5-acre tracts – one where HUPTI was built and the other, across the pond, where the university will develop a hotel for patients and their families and visiting medical personnel.
Treatment at the HUPTI is not considered experimental and is covered by most major health insurers, including Medicare and Medicaid, according to Harvey.
Hampton University also has made provisions for patients without insurance. “I birthed this baby, and one of the things that I wanted to do was to make sure that if, for any reason, someone did not have insurance, I did not want them to not be able to be treated,” Harvey said. “So, I have budgeted 3 percent of our budget to handle indigent people who do not have any insurance.”
During a recent tour of the HUPTI, Keppel explained how the facility and therapy will work.
Hampton University custom designed the facility in what Keppel likes to describe as a marriage “of medical, physical and engineering expertise into a common effort.”
“We thought through our center from the ground up,” she said. “We worked with our architects, our equipment people and our physicians to try to make it as patient friendly as possible. It's designed to reflect the technology that's here but also as an inspiring, positive and hopeful environment for patients.”
Comforting touches include a patient resource center with computer access and coffee, a peaceful healing garden, cheerful and assuring color schemes, and robotic patient positioning systems for the treatment beds.
Many patients at other proton centers have come to call their therapy sessions "radiation vacations," because of the combination of travel and reduction in side effects, said Keppel.
At the heart of the HUPTI is a 240-ton cyclotron that accelerates a stream of protons to about 70 percent of the speed of light, or more than 402 million miles per hour. That generates 230 million electron volts, making these positively charged subatomic particles ready to be beamed into a human tumor with millimeter accuracy.
“We have an incredible, high-precision tool that allows us to deposit the dose into just the tumor region and in the shape of the tumor. That means radiation is delivered primarily to the tumor and not anywhere else,” Keppel said.
Each therapy session runs about 20 minutes, with most of that time spent on patient positioning. The actual dose from the proton beam lasts only about one minute, Keppel said.
Robotic controls allow the treatment beds to be situated precisely in three dimensions, also with roll, pitch and yaw, helping the medical staff assure the best angle for delivering the proton beam to a tumor. Laser and X-ray imaging systems also are used to accurately line up a patient on a treatment bed.
There are five treatment rooms, but even more of the high-tech work will occur out of the patient's view. Behind the wall and ceilings of each room is a three-story, 90-ton, gantry that looks like a steel spider web and rotates 360 degrees around a patient as part of lining up the precise path of the proton beam.
Proton doses are individually determined for each patient and the information is relayed electronically from the treatment room to a room that Keppel likens to an “air traffic control center.”
“When a therapist says, 'My patient is ready,' our accelerator engineers will set up custom beam parameters that are unique to that patient. The therapist or physician pushes the button to deliver the beam, but the engineers have done the tuning and the setting up of the beam for each patient,” Keppel said.
Meanwhile, at the far end of the building, the cyclotron already has been operating 24/7 to create the proton beam. Here, protons are extracted from hydrogen with a high-voltage current and then injected into an accelerator where, said Keppel, “the charged protons encounter a magnetic field and gain more and more energy as they go around in a larger and larger radius.”
While proton therapy is the main purpose of HUPTI, the facility will have a clinical wing where new patients will be evaluated for appropriate treatment. There also is space where research will be conducted on proton technology development, radiation biology and medical image guidance.
“We'll also be working with NASA Langley, which is just up the street. Because more than 90 percent of space radiation is from protons, the scientists there want to investigate radiative effects on materials and the effect of radiation on astronauts,” Keppel said.
Dr. Allan Thornton, a radiation oncologist at the HUPTI, offers this perspective: “I like to say that the Hampton University Proton Therapy Institute is not just a treatment center... and not just a community resource but a regional resource.”
To learn more about the Hampton University Proton Therapy Institute, call (757) 251-6800, send an e-mail to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or visit www.hamptonproton.org.
