P-Cure will install Israel's first proton therapy system to be used to treat patients at Hadassah Medical Organization. (Photo courtesy of P-Cure)
Hadassah Medical Organization will be the first to offer proton therapy as a cancer treatment in Israel.
Using P-Cure’s 360-degree gantry-less adaptive proton therapy solution, the hospital will provide treatment as part of a clinical research initiative, with no cost to patients or medical insurers. Hadassah will perform procedures at the P-Cure Clinical Research and Development Center, which will oversee patient intake and discharge, treatment planning and treatment delivery infrastructure. Additionally, the center will offer ambulatory services to treat complications in emergencies.
The medical team will initially focus on patients with brain, head and neck, thoracic and pancreatic tumors. Treatment is expected to begin in fall 2022. "Until now, the patients in Israel who were found eligible for proton therapy have had to travel abroad. This has tremendous psychological and economic burdens to the patients, their families, and the medical insurers in the country,” said professor Aron Popovtzer, the director of Sharett Institute of Oncology at Hadassah Medical Center, in a statement.
P-Cure’s system delivers treatment to patients sitting in an upright position. Instead of a rotating gantry, the solution applies radiation with pencil beam scanning from different angles to hit all anatomical sites. This significantly reduces equipment dimensions, with the seated position decreasing body motion to allow for more precise beam delivery and accurate treatment.
And because it has no gantry, the technology reduces construction cost and those for equipment by half. P-Cure CEO Michael Marash says the technology has the potential to speed up the building of these facilities and increase access to proton therapy. “The compact P-Cure system installed inside existing radiation oncology departments removes the economic barrier to offering more patients the benefits of proton therapy; and, this is in addition to the clinical benefits of proton therapy that will be generated by prof. Popovtzer and his team in Israel.”
