A Medical Device Daily

ProCure Treatment Centers (Bloomington, Indiana) and the Roberts Proton Therapy Center at the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia) reported an agreement to provide advanced training programs and accredit medical professionals in proton therapy — an alternative to conventional radiation therapy.

The agreement focuses on expanding research on the technology to be used for the delivery of proton therapy and developing new protocols using protons to treat a wider range of cancers.

Protons are used primarily to treat about a dozen diagnoses, including base-of-skull tumors, ocular melanoma, sinus tumors, pediatric cancers and prostate cancer. As more centers are developed and the capacity for patients increases, the Roberts Proton Therapy Center and ProCure will establish clinical studies to evaluate the use of protons in areas such as proton therapy in combination with chemotherapy and the improved results obtained from increasing the dose delivered to the tumor.

ProCure’s network of proton therapy centers will increase the number of patients that can potentially be enrolled in studies. The center will provide oversight, establish data collection procedures, analyze data and work through any necessary regulatory process.

“The partnership allows us to integrate our research with a national network of proton therapy centers all working to learn more about the optimal utilization of proton therapy,” said Stephen Hahn, MD, chairman of the Department of Radiation Oncology. “With an estimated 250,000 patients who could benefit from proton therapy each year, the more research and data we can collect, the better we will be able to treat patients.”

The Center and ProCure said they will collaborate on setting standards for proton therapy education and training, and will offer accreditation in the field.

In other agreement news:

• Waters (Milford, Massachusetts) and Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC, Nashville, Tennessee) reported they will pursue collaborative research using Waters Maldi Synapt High Definition MS System for enhanced tissue imaging capabilities for oncology research within the university’s Mass Spectrometry Research Center.

VUMC researchers are focused on novel mass spectrometry approaches to identify and visualize protein expression changes in cells as they transition from a healthy state through various stages of cancer.

“The goal of tissue imaging is to provide a window into the changes in the cellular proteome in disease,” said Richard Caprioli, director of Mass Spectrometry Research Center at VUMC. “We look forward to evaluating the use of ion mobility for enhanced Maldi imaging combined with high resolution, high sensitivity, orthogonal time-of-flight mass spectrometry. Ultimately, we hope that enhanced tissue imaging techniques will provide data sets to be mined for diagnostic and prognostic information related to the various stages of cancer.”