One of the most advanced forms of radiation treatment for cancer will soon be available in Connecticut.
Connecticut Proton Therapy Center, built in partnership between the state’s two largest hospital systems, Hartford Healthcare and Yale New Haven Health, is expected to start seeing patients in the coming months.
Proton therapy is a highly precise treatment for tumors. It minimizes damage to healthy tissue and has fewer side effects than other radiation therapies.
Treatment is typically administered five days a week for several weeks.
There are only 52 proton centers in the country, according to the National Association for Proton Therapy. The Connecticut center is only the second of its kind in New England.
“For far too long, people seeking proton therapy often had the added burden of having to travel for hours in order to get this advanced care, on top of an already daunting chore of navigating their own cancer care,” Yale New Haven Health’s acting CEO Pamela Sutton-Wallace said. “Today, that changes.”
The machine itself is massive, weighing in at 55 tons — and it’s expensive to build and maintain.
The room where the patient receives treatment is not particularly large. However, the room that houses the cyclotron particle accelerator is much larger, requiring several stories to operate.
Dr. Charles Rutter is a radiation oncologist and will serve as the center's assistant medical director.
“Modern radiation therapy, regardless of approach, is capable of ablating tumors deep inside of a patient's body, in their brain, their spine,” Rutter said. “We can cure early-stage lung cancers in patients that are too medically frail to receive surgery or other curative treatments, and in those that can't be cured, we can combine the abilities of our radiation teams with modern systemic therapy to keep patients alive for a very long time and reduce their suffering.”
“The Proton Center represents a quantum leap in the technologies that we have here in Connecticut,” Rutter continued.
A second proton center is expected to break ground later this year in Danbury.
