ASCO 2015

Exciting new developments in proton therapy treatments

Dr Hernán Cortés-Funes - HC Marbella, Marbella, Spain

You’re building in this wonderful little centre in Marbella, a proton centre. And here in ASCO there’s an educational session on protons, so what’s that all about?

Proton therapy is something very new. It started more than ten years ago, especially in University Hospital as a research programme. It’s a way to give radiotherapy, not photon therapy but protons, that is a way to give a more precise treatment in some specific patients. It was started with paediatric patients, with chordoma from [?? 0:37] and also meningioma benign tumour and also expanding to other tumours. Proton therapy, the advantage of proton therapy is that the treatment gives 100% of the energy given to the tumour and there is no energy and no radiation to the normal tissues, surrounding tissue. This is very helpful because the patient didn’t have any side effects.

Now we are at the beginning of this treatment but there is a grand expansion all around the world. In the States there are more than twenty units, in Europe there are 15-20 trying to develop in different countries. In Spain we have no unit, in the UK also, in France they have only two. Probably in the future we will hear a lot about the result of proton therapy. It’s very hard because it’s a very expensive unit to be implanted in different places – you need a new building, you need a cyclotron, you need a lot of technology – but they will come. And the early results we have in our hands is very promising.

The cost is coming down. The cost has been the toxicity, hasn’t it, but the cost is now coming down and it’s affordable.

Yes, the cost of each unit is very, very expensive because the machines are very expensive but now it’s coming down because the technology is more advanced and the costs of the differing companies competing and the price is reducing to close to half of the original price. We are running, the last three years, running the project, trying to find investors and now at the present time there are some European machines that are much, much cheaper and more advanced than the American or Japanese machines. I think in the very short term we will have some results. I know that in the UK they are trying to develop several units and I’m sure they will succeed with one.