Sometimes it takes a really big machine to produce thousands of small miracles. 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.
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.
Saturday, March 8, 2008
Doctors at Penn Medicine symposium praise proton radiation as a cancer treatment
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