Hospital trusts win funding to advance particle beam therapy

By 2017 it is hoped that around 1,500 cancer patients — many of them children — will benefit from the cutting-edge treatment at University College London Hospitals (UCLH) NHS Foundation Trust and the Christie NHS Foundation Trust hospital in Manchester.

Particle beam therapy, which uses protons or other ions, is a highly targeted modality of cancer treatment that can precisely irradiate tumours while preserving healthy tissue — especially valuable in brain tumours.

Although the basic technology has been in place since the mid-1980s, its application in cancer medicine has only really come of age in the past decade. However, the UK presently lacks any full-scale facilities and NHS patients have previously been sent abroad for treatment.

With the latest funding, the two centres will launch a procurement phase considering technological offerings from seven potential suppliers including Hitachi, IBA, Varian and Sumitomo.

‘Ideally we’d get one supplier for both sites because there would be economies of scale and, given the engineering support we need for this, there would hopefully be a tranche of engineers situated somewhere between ourselves and Manchester,’ Derek D’Souza, head of radiotherapy physics at UCLH, told The Engineer.