Proton therapy center advances in SWFL

Proton therapy is taking a significant step forward in Southwest Florida with the addition of a new medical director to the team.

WINK News has been following the journey to build this specialized center, which received its crucial cyclotron late last year.

Dr. Shannon MacDonald, a radiation oncologist and senior medical director for Southwest Florida Proton, is ready to lead the center into its next phase.

“It’s very exciting to open a new center. The machine that they have is state of the art,” said MacDonald.

MacDonald, who has been in the field for 18 years, is enthusiastic about the advancements in proton therapy.

“I was interested in the treatment modality, the ability to spare more healthy tissue and to give higher doses to some cancers that need it, which was impossible to do with regular radiation,” she said.

MacDonald’s background includes experience at Massachusetts General Hospital, the birthplace of proton therapy.

“They had the Harvard cyclotron, which was actually worked on by some of the physicists that worked on the atomic bomb,” she said.

The proton therapy process involves using a cyclotron to accelerate protons to treat cancer.

“You need a cyclotron, which essentially you take a proton off of water, accelerate it to two-thirds the speed of light and then you feed it out through a beam line of magnets and degraders into the patient room,” MacDonald said.

The center’s cyclotron cost $20 million, contributing to the facility’s estimated $80 million price tag. With the components and staff in place, MacDonald is working on developing protocols for patient treatment.

“So that will be a process that I’ll go over with the doctors and physicists and dosimeters that work with us to figure out who will benefit most,” she said.

The center is expected to draw patients from outside Southwest Florida and potentially internationally.

“I think there will be patients coming here specifically for proton therapy, and the expertise that we’ll have here—from outside of Florida and maybe internationally,” MacDonald said.

Currently, the center is open for other forms of advanced cancer treatment, but the proton therapy is not yet operational.

The cyclotron now needs several months of calibration before it can be used for treatment.