New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
CT’s largest hospital networks teaming up for new cancer center
Usually competitors, the state's two largest health care networks are teaming up to build a new cancer center that focuses on proton radiation therapy.
Proton radiation therapy is safer than the more widely used X-ray radiation therapy, according to Dr. Ken Roberts, associate chief of radiation oncology at Yale New Haven Hospital.
The problem is cost. Facilities that offer proton radiation therapy for cancer patients are expensive to build and operate.
So, Yale New Haven Health and Hartford HealthCare are working together to build one.
“It's because of the cost that both institutions felt that this was a unique instance where we were better off joining forces than being competitors,” Roberts said. “There's been a remarkable level of cooperation for this.”
“We started talking about it about 10 or 12 years ago,” said Dr. Andy Salner, medical director at Hartford HealthCare's Cancer Institute at Hartford Hospital. “We realized maybe five years ago that neither of us had the volume to justify having our own machine.”
“It's really an equal project of the two healthcare systems,” Salner said.
Projected to open in 2025, the $70 million, 25,000-square-foot center on Northrop Road in Wallingford will be the first in Connecticut. The goal, Roberts said, was to be centrally located.
“This particular program here in Connecticut is going to be a proton-only facility that's specifically set up in the central part of the state for patient convenience,” he said.
X-rays are more often beamed into the body to fight tumors, but Roberts explained that there are problems with that therapy. Xrays are not as easy to localize, which can cause damage to healthy parts of the body.
The X-rays can scatter throughout the body, and can cause damage as they leave the body, as well. By contrast, proton radiation therapy is more precise. There are no exit points for the beam of protons, which means fewer side effects.
“An individual X-ray beam courses through the entire body,” Roberts said. “Proton radiation beams don't penetrate all the way through the body when you aim a treatment beam into a tumor.”
“Protons have the particular capability of entering the body at a very low dose, depositing the dose at the tumor and then have no exit beam,” Salner said.
That's particularly useful for younger cancer patients. Radiation therapy can affect the growth and development of young children.
“For kids, even a low dose of radiation outside the tumor has a risk of damaging a normal heart function,” Salner said. “Treating a brain tumor, we could impair the cognitive growth of a patient.”
For this reason, proton radiation therapy has been an emerging technology. Though developed more than 40 years ago, there were only 12 such centers in the entire United States a decade ago.
Cancer patients for whom proton therapy would be valuable have been sent to either Mass General or the N.Y. Proton Center in Manhattan, the only options in the northeast United States.
Now there are 38 centers nationwide, Salner said, with 10 more in active development, including Connecticut's
“It's becoming a more prominent part of our armamentarium to treat cancer,” he said.