Proton Therapy Used More to Treat Cancer

HOUSTON (AP) -- Francis Maloy lay on his back on a narrow, metallic table, waiting for a giant machine to bombard the tumor in his chest with proton beams.

"The last time I heard about protons I was in college taking physics," said Maloy, a 68-year-old retired Army colonel from Stuart, Fla., just before the procedure.

Maloy, who has advanced lung cancer, is one of the first patients being treated at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center's new $125 million Proton Therapy Center.

It is the largest of the nation's four centers that treat cancer by targeting proton beams narrowly on the tumor itself, sparing the healthy tissue that with typical X-ray radiation would be blasted along with the cancer cells.

While newer forms of traditional radiation, with the help of computers, also allow doctors to precisely target a tumor, proton therapy allows higher levels of radiation. For a patient like Maloy, it could be his best hope at this stage of his cancer.

Dr. James Cox, chief of radiation oncology at M.D. Anderson, wasn't always a believer in the technology. But he said studies have shown proton therapy allows a higher level of radiation on the tumor, with less damage to healthy tissue and fewer side effects, such as loss of appetite, diarrhea and headaches. "That was the breakthrough, what changed my mind," he said.

"Anytime you have cancer in any location where it requires a high dose for control and it's close to sensitive normal structures (such as the eye, the skull, the spinal cord) that's an indication for proton therapy," said Cox. It also is useful for treating cancer in children, who are more sensitive than adults to the side effects of radiation.

Doctors at M.D. Anderson are using proton beam treatments mostly on patients whose cancers are so early in development that a cure is possible. But it is also being used on people like Maloy, who have relatively advanced cancers, Cox said.

Proton therapy has been around since the mid-1950s but was done mostly at research facilities, according to the National Association for Proton Therapy. The world's first hospital-based facility opened in 1990 at Loma Linda University Medical Center in California.

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