Center Uses Anti-Cancer Proton Beam : Medicine: The Loma Linda facility is the first dedicated to medical uses of the promising radiation technique. Treatment of eye melanomas is under way.
Loma Linda University Medical Center on Tuesday inaugurated the world’s first hospital-based cancer treatment facility that uses a beam of protons to irradiate tumors.
Declaring that their $45-million center marks a “milestone” in cancer treatment, Loma Linda officials said proton therapy could ultimately be effective for many of the 1 million new patients diagnosed with cancer in the United States each year.
Although the use of protons--positively charged particles in the nucleus of atoms--to destroy cancer cells is not a new concept, Loma Linda’s facility is the first dedicated solely to medical purposes. Previously, several thousand patients have received proton treatments at laboratories designed for physics research.
“This is an important beginning,” said Dr. James M. Slater, chairman of Loma Linda’s department of radiation medicine. “If this (treatment) produces the benefits we anticipate, there will be many, many centers like this one available to cancer patients.”
On Tuesday, the Loma Linda center treated its first patient--a 35-year-old rehabilitation nurse from the Los Angeles area suffering from a tumor in her right eye. At a news conference, the patient, Becky Carrillo, said the proton treatment gave her hope of retaining her eye and her vision.
“I feel very grateful,” said Carrillo, who will undergo five treatments and was told there is a 96% chance they will destroy her tumor. “My husband said, ‘Don’t get your hopes up too high,’ . . . but I feel like I’ve been given another chance.”
Carrillo was diagnosed with ocular melanoma on Sept. 18 after a partial vision loss prompted her to consult an ophthalmologist. Her doctor said the only remedy was removal of the eye, but a friend told Carrillo to seek a second opinion at Loma Linda, and the medical center agreed to treat her.
Several weeks ago, several tiny metal rings were sutured around the base of the eye tumor to help doctors focus exactly on their target. Tuesday morning, Carrillo sat in a padded gray seat resembling a dental chair for her first encounter with the proton beam.
Her head was held still by a plastic mask attached to the chair’s frame, and she was told to focus her eye on a light. There was some minor discomfort, caused by having her eyelids stretched open to reveal the eye’s surface, but otherwise Carrillo called the 67-second treatment “painless.”
Proton therapy is a form of radiation effective on certain types of so-called localized tumors--those that have not yet spread throughout the body. It is made possible by the use of an accelerator, called a synchrotron, that accelerates the protons to reach the energy level proven effective against cancer cells.
Because the energy of the beam can be precisely delivered to a tumor without seriously harming healthy surrounding tissues or vital organs, proton treatment is free of many of the side effects of conventional radiation.
Proton therapy also allows doctors to supply a more potent dose of radiation. In conventional radiation therapy, the danger of inflicting excessive damage on adjacent organs or healthy cells often requires doctors to use a less-than-optimal dose, Slater said.
Loma Linda’s center, funded by private contributions and $19.6 million in grants from the U.S. Department of Energy, will initially treat patients with ocular tumors, like Carrillo. Slater said patients with head and neck cancers will be accepted in December and those with cancers below the shoulder may be treated early next year.
By late 1991, the facility could be treating as many as 100 people a day, Slater said.
Development of proton therapy has evolved over the past 45 years, and to date 8,000 cancer patients worldwide have been treated. One Harvard University study showed that after at least two years of follow-up, 96.3% of 1,008 patients with melanoma of the eye had no further tumor growth, and 90% retained their eyes.
