The future of cancer care has arrived at Ohio State with the opening of the region’s first proton therapy center.

After a decade of planning, the new state-of-the-art facility has officially been launched inside The James Outpatient Care in the Carmenton innovation district on The Ohio State University campus.

While there are a handful of cancer hospitals around the globe that offer proton radiation treatment, The James proton therapy center offers the “most advanced proton radiation therapy in the world,” according to Arnab Chakravarti, MD, chair of the department of radiation oncology at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – James Cancer Hospital and Solove Research Institute.

While not applicable to all cancer patients, those who qualify for proton therapy will receive a host of benefits, including reductions in the side effects that sometimes accompany traditional radiation treatments.

“With conventional radiation, there is an entry point and exit point, and all the normal tissue in-between receives radiation,” Chakravarti says. “With proton radiation, one of the great benefits is it minimizes the amount of normal tissue that is irradiated. The goal is to eradicate the tumor and minimize side effects in patients.”

Initial studies have shown that proton radiation can reduce the number of, what Chakravarti calls, “radiation-induced malignancies.” Over the next few years, Chakravarti and his radiation oncology team plan to develop new ways to better utilize the technology, including FLASH proton therapy.

“FLASH refers to an ultra-high dose of proton radiation that can be 10,000-fold more potent than conventional radiation,” Chakravarti says. “So, treatments that currently take six to eight weeks, with the patient being treated five days a week, can be shortened to a single treatment lasting less than a tenth of a second.”

Another possible advance could be the development of image-guided proton radiation therapy.

“Cancer cells have microscopic extensions beyond what we can see on scans,” Chakravarti says. “We’re developing an image-guidance platform that will target cancer cells where they sequester — they can run but they can’t hide from this technology.”

Chakravarti and his team also hope to utilize artificial intelligence to deliver proton radiation better and more precisely. The treatment will be specific to each James patient and “will result in the tumor getting the maximum proton radiation dose and minimizing it on the surrounding tissue,” he says.

Learn all about The James Outpatient Care at The Ohio State University: https://go.osu.edu/Chx5

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