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University of Florida officials are heralding the Jacksonville City Council鈥檚 recent approval of a $19 million bond issue to help establish Florida鈥檚 first proton beam cancer treatment facility at Shands Jacksonville Medical Center.

Groundbreaking ceremonies for the long-anticipated project have been scheduled for 10 a.m. Jan. 29.

鈥淭he current schedule calls for us to move forward with actual construction beginning approximately April 1,鈥� said C. Craig Tisher, M.D., dean of UF鈥檚 College of Medicine and the project鈥檚 director. 鈥淲e鈥檝e been working to put all our funding in place by mid-March.鈥� City Council officials approved the bond issue with a 17-1 vote Aug. 14. Another bond issue will finance technology and start-up costs totaling about $62 million. The funding will supplement $11 million in legislative appropriations earmarked for construction.

鈥淚 personally have been very appreciative of the tremendous support we鈥檝e received from the Jacksonville community鈥攖he leadership in the Jacksonville city government as well as the many individuals within the community who鈥檝e supported the project from its inception,鈥� Tisher said.

Proton beam therapy involves the delivery of tightly focused doses of electrically charged particles called protons to destroy tumors, with little or no damage to adjacent healthy tissues. The treatment is an effective way to target tumors in children and cancers of the prostate, brain, eyes, and head and neck, and has the potential to increase cure rates while reducing complications, experts say. It also is used on patients who have certain eye diseases, including a form of age-related macular degeneration.

The facility is expected to become a centerpiece of the UF Shands Cancer Center, which encompasses advanced patient-care, education and research programs at the Gainesville and Jacksonville campuses. It will be staffed by UF radiation oncologists and a 115-member support team.

鈥淲hile this is a very specific radiation technology, we anticipate its effects will be far-reaching in the cancer center,鈥� said Nancy Mendenhall, M.D., chairwoman of UF鈥檚 department of radiation oncology and the Rodney R. Million, M.D., professor of radiation oncology. 鈥淲e believe it will attract patients with many different diagnoses who will need other forms of cancer treatment as well, such as chemotherapy, surgery and conventional radiation, so our hope is that it will be a cornerstone of an overall cancer program and enhance growth throughout the clinical cancer services.

鈥淲e鈥檙e going to have a unique radiation oncology facility, with both conventional radiation therapy and proton beam therapy in the same building,鈥� she added. 鈥淲e think this will enable us to offer the best treatment to patients with any kind of cancer treatable with radiation. We think it will enable us to participate better in combined modality therapy programs where chemotherapy is being used because many times the radiation side effects limit what can be done with chemotherapy. For example, the rates of esophagitis in patients treated for head and neck or lung cancer are likely to drop significantly, permitting physicians to deliver more intense chemotherapy.鈥�

Proton beam therapy requires a complex array of machinery that must be run by a highly trained team of medical, engineering and computer scientists.

鈥淐omputerization and the quality of imaging that鈥檚 now available makes this technology applicable to an increasing population of patients with various forms of cancer,鈥� Tisher said. 鈥淚t鈥檚 an excellent treatment for the wet form of age-related macular degeneration, the most common cause of blindness in the elderly.鈥�

Tsoi/Kobus & Associates, a Boston-based architectural and engineering firm, has designed the three-story facility. Perry-McCall Construction Co., of Jacksonville, first will build the portions of the building that will contain the proton beam generator, and the treatment area. The facility will be situated on a 3.7-acre site on UF鈥檚 Shands Jacksonville campus. The top floor will be dedicated to research.

Belgium-based Ion Beam Applications Co. will then install the proton beam equipment while the remainder of the building is finished. Officials estimate that most of the construction will end by November 2004, with all equipment to be installed by December 2005.

More than 2,000 cancer patients a year are expected to undergo proton beam therapy at the Shands Jacksonville site once the facility is fully operational.

Two proton beam facilities are in operation elsewhere in the United States, at the Loma Linda University Medical Center in Loma Linda, Calif., and at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

鈥淲e鈥檝e known for years about the superior dose distribution of protons鈥攂ut until you can precisely delineate the borders of the tumor, you don鈥檛 want to make your radiation dose conform too tightly because you鈥檒l miss the cancer,鈥� said Mendenhall, who will serve as the facility鈥檚 first medical director. 鈥淧rotons would have been useful for only a few tumors in the 1970s and 1980s because we just couldn鈥檛 define them well enough with the imaging tools of those days. By the mid-90s, with high-resolution CT scans and MR imaging, enhanced by functional imaging, it began to make sense to precisely conform our radiation dose distribution around these better-defined tumor targets. We also have the ability now to localize these cancers when a patient is on a radiation treatment table and to immobilize the patient so that there鈥檚 little or no body motion.鈥�

Respiration moves the diaphragm up and down several centimeters, enough to potentially move a lung tumor in and out of the treatment field, requiring physicians to target radiation to a wide margin of healthy tissue around the tumor to compensate.

鈥淲e are working on radiation beam gaiting now,鈥� Mendenhall said. 鈥淚f you can gait the radiation beam to only turn on when the patient is breathing in or exhaling, and you don鈥檛 have to account for organ motion, you can use much tighter margins. We think that most localized cancers are curable with radiation if you can get a high enough radiation dose. In many malignancies we鈥檝e already documented better cure rates with higher doses. What prevents us from giving very high doses to all cancers is the surrounding normal tissues because they鈥檙e also damaged by radiation. If we have a way of avoiding normal tissues we can give higher doses and get higher cure rates. The proton beam reduces the inadvertent normal tissue exposure quite significantly. We therefore expect both higher cure rates and less radiation toxicity with proton beam therapy.鈥�

UF scientists also are planning a variety of proton beam-related research projects, some cancer-related, and others focused on innovative uses of protons in the treatment of other, nonmalignant disorders, Tisher said. In addition, NASA has expressed interested in studying the impact of protons on certain inert materials. Other biomedical researchers will examine the impact of radiation on cell death and cell recovery, and the effect of low doses of protons on living materials such as plants.

Tisher and Mendenhall spent the past four years planning the project in collaboration with a steering committee that included Louis Russo, M.D., former senior associate dean for Jacksonville programs of the 网红黑料 Science Center; and Greg Miller, vice president for operations at Shands Jacksonville.