The recent wave of newly constructed medical centers dedicated to proton radiation therapy comes as no surprise to James Slater, a radiation oncologist at Loma Linda University Medical Center. By 2010, four new US centers will start treating cancer patients. With two others that opened in 2006, that’s more than double the number that had existed in the US in the first 15 years after Slater led the Southern California medical center in building the first hospital-based proton center in 1990. “I expected [this growth] to happen much sooner,” he says.
In what may promise even more growth, some physics research labs and small companies are now developing room-sized proton accelerators to bring the treatment to existing medical centers. Those companies say their technology will supply a single treatment room for less than $30 million, a fraction of the $100 million to $200 million it now takes to build and...
