In October, Varian and Scripps successfully completed the acceptance process for the third treatment room, one of the critical steps required prior to handover of the room to the Scripps clinical team for commissioning.

The Scripps Proton Therapy Center has also been in the news.

• The Haskell Company, the design/construction firm for the Center, recently received an Award of Merit for the project from ENR California.
• Dr. Carl Rossi, the Medical Director of the Scripps Proton Therapy Center, was featured in an article in the San Diego Union Tribune highlighting the benefits of proton therapy for breast cancer treatment:

‘”According to Dr. Carl Rossi, medical director of the center, proton beam radiation therapy is different from X-rays.

“X-rays pass completely through the body. Protons come to an abrupt stop at a physician-defined depth,” he said. “What does it mean? In practical terms it means that by using protons as opposed to X-rays, I can treat far less healthy tissue in front of and especially behind the target than is the case if I do the exact same treatment with X-rays.”

That’s positive for the patient, because there is never any advantage to irradiating healthy normal tissue, said Rossi.

“As we get better and better at curing cancers and people are living longer and longer after treatment, you have to be increasingly concerned about the long-term side effects of your treatment,” he said. “In a sense, we are at a risk of becoming victims of our own success. As we cure more patients, more of them have the opportunity to suffer from the side effects of our treatment.”

For instance, a New England Journal of Medicine article published in early 2013 looked at the risk of heart disease in women who had received X-ray radiation to their left breast and chest as part of their cancer treatment.

“This remains a standard component of breast cancer therapy and it is one of the things that allow many women to avoid mastectomy,” said Rossi. “The difficulty is, that when you do this treatment with X-rays, because of the shape of the breast and the chest wall and because of the fact that the X-rays do not stop where you would like them to stop, you end up radiating a varying portion of the underlying heart. When you radiate the heart you cause irreversible damage to the blood vessels and the heart muscle.

“In contrast, by using protons to do this type of treatment, and taking advantage of the fact that they can be stopped before hitting the heart, in many cases we can reduce the radiation dose to the heart to zero.”

Breast cancer treatment is undergoing a transformation, largely due to the development of therapies which have been ‘targeted at the disease by exploiting certain unique aspects of a cancer cell,” he said.

“This is helping us to eliminate, or at least reduce the use of, the ‘shotgun approach’ that has characterized cancer therapy for many years, where we would use drugs that really do not discriminate very well between the good cells and the bad cells, hence people losing their hair, having their immune systems compromised, etc.,” said Rossi.”” – Read the full article at the Union Tribune website: “October is in the pink, Tailored treatment is huge milestone in breast cancer battle.”