Apollo Proton Cancer Centre (APCC), the most advanced Cancer Centre in India and the first Proton Therapy Centre in South Asia & the Middle East has so far treated 800 patients at its centre in Chennai, said Harish Trivedi, Chief Executive Officer at Apollo Proton Cancer Centres.
APCC is India's first JCI accredited Cancer hospital and offers end-to-end cancer care and has high-end technology in cancer management under one roof. The hospital is a beacon of hope for over 3.5 billion people.
APCC recently successfully treated a 62-year-old man from Mumbai suffering from lung cancer with proton beam therapy (PBT).
We have a whole team of super specialists who come together and discuss each patient’s case and then take a decision regarding the patient, said Trivedi.
The Proton therapy needs massive infrastructure. First the 120 tonnes machine has to be set up and then the hospital has to be built around it, he informed.
In India, the estimated number of cancer incident cases in 2022 is 14,61,427. Since 2019, 10 patients from Maharashtra have been treated at APCC for thoracic cancers including lung cancer.
According to the International Association of Cancer Registries (IARC), over 24,000 people die each year as a result of brain tumours. So far, the APCC has treated 336 cases of brain tumours, 45 of which are from Maharashtra.
Dr Srinivas Chilukuri, Radiation Oncologist, Apollo Proton Cancer Centre, Chennai, said “Proton beam therapy is the most sophisticated form of radiation therapy currently available in the world. At the Apollo Proton Cancer Center, we have the latest PBS technology, which enables us to deliver highly focused protons, spot-by-spot and layer-by-layer, encompassing the entire tumour with a reduced or even no dose to the adjacent healthy tissues. In cases such as this, where the tumour is in a risky location such as the base of the skull or in the lung, proton therapy delivers a beam of protons to disrupt the tumour and better target radiation to the size and shape of the tumour without damaging the surrounding healthy tissue. It has been proven to be successful in curing or controlling many cancers when used appropriately. Proton therapy reduces the immediate and long-term side effects of treatment in many patients, leading to not just an improvement in survival but also survivorship.”
The major advantage of proton therapy treatment is that protons slowly deposit their energy as they travel towards the cancerous tumour and deposit most of the radiation dose directly in the tumour without damaging the body further thus maintaining healthy tissues and organs without any complications. Proton therapy has been shown to have excellent local control of various cancers located in some of the most difficult areas such as skull-base regions of the body which are otherwise difficult to treat. The latest breakthroughs in this technology including pencil beam scanning, highly precise image guidance and tremendous refinements in the machine set up have led to the adoption of this technology throughout the world in hospital settings in the last few years.
Proton therapy is being encouragingly adopted for the treatment of various cancers such as brain and spine tumours, skull base tumours, oral cancers, gastro-intestinal cancers, bone and soft tissue tumours, breast cancers, thoracic cancers (lung cancer), genitourinary cancers (prostate cancer) and predominantly in paediatric cancers except for leukaemia.
