I HAD PROTON BEAM THERAPY to stop my prostate cancer

It’s an innovative treatment that’s gaining in popularity for patients

SURGERY or radiotherapy. These were the two options presented to Simon Hardacre when he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer last year. Neither appealed.

He knew that surgery carried the risk of incontinence and impotence. And he’d been treated with radiotherapy for throat and neck cancer six years previously, and had no desire to repeat the experience.

‘I knew I couldn’t go through it again,’ says Simon, 56, a company director.

‘Radiotherapy was horrendous, and at times I wanted to curl up and die as I felt so sick. I couldn’t swallow so had to be fed via a tube into my stomach. My neck was also very sore.

‘It took about 13 months to fully recover and to regain my appetite.’

But then he was offered a third option, and three months ago Simon became the first person in Britain to be treated with high-energy proton beam therapy.

‘I had no idea I’d be the first person to have it in Britain,’ he says. ‘But I really didn’t want another treatment which could possibly leave me with incontinence issues or impact on my love life.

‘I’m convinced if I’d undergone a different treatment, I wouldn’t feel as well as I do.’

Proton beam therapy is a type of radiotherapy. But rather than using X-rays, like the conventional type, the radiation that destroys tumour cells comes from protons, which are tiny, positively-charged particles.

The particles are ‘accelerated’ to a speed of 100,000 miles a second and then fired at the tumour. It is thought to be more precise and so less damaging to surrounding, healthy tissue than conventional radiotherapy, meaning fewer side-effects.

IN MOST cases, the patient would have the same number of proton beam sessions as with radiotherapy. It has only just been introduced to Britain with the opening of the first private proton beam centre.

Simon was treated at the Rutherford Cancer Centre in South Wales, which started giving patients proton beam therapy in April. Other private centres are being built at Liverpool and Reading.

High-energy proton beam therapy itself is not new. But since 2008, patients would travel to specialist centres in Jacksonville, Florida, and Oklahoma City in the US, as well as Switzerland, at a cost of around €125,000 per patient.

In Ireland, the Proton Therapy Centre has treatment co-ordinators here to assist Irish patients to get treatment at their clinic headquarters in Prague. This is the same clinic that treated Ashya King, then five, in 2014 for medulloblastoma, a type of brain tumour. His parents were arrested in Spain after removing him from Southampton General Hospital, where doctors had wanted to treat their son more conventionally with radiotherapy and chemotherapy.

But a court later ruled that Ashya could undergo proton beam therapy at the Prague centre, which can be accessed privately by Irish patients, and earlier this year his family said Ashya no longer had any signs of tumours in his body.

Proton Partners International have bought a site in Kildare and have lodged a planning application for a €100m state-of-the-art treatment facility, so it looks like we will be seeing a lot more of this style of treatment here.

Proton beam therapy is generally used for cancers in hard-to-reach areas or where it is near particularly vulnerable tissue, such as the optic nerve or spinal cord. It is also used to treat some cancers in children, often brain tumours.

‘Proton beam therapy means treatment for some cancers can be more precise,’ says cancer expert Dr Justine Alford.

This is because protons only release their energy (which is what kills cancer cells) when they hit their target — unlike X-rays in conventional radiotherapy, which release radiation as they travel, causing damage to healthy tissue en route.

This is what causes side-effects. Scientists can map exactly where the protons need to go in the body and calculate their trajectory, so that they stop before releasing a huge burst of energy against the tumour,’ explains Dr Alford.

‘They don’t release any energy before this, so they’re not causing harm on entry to the body or after hitting the tumour.’ The main barrier to access of treatment up until now has been the enormous cost of the equipment.

ABRITISH Medical Journal article in 2012 stated that the cost of proton beam treatment for prostate cancer, for example, is roughly twice as much as conventional radiotherapy — and three times as much as surgery.

And this has weighed against the argument for proton beam therapy.