P-Cure Ltd. (“P-Cure”), the provider of the most compact 360° gantry-less adaptive proton therapy system that can be installed in a linac vault, announced today a collaboration with Hadassah Medical Organization (“Hadassah”) in Jerusalem. The collaboration will provide cancer patients in Israel with access to proton therapy, the most targeted type of radiation therapy. The treatments will be carried out as a clinical research initiative with no economic burden to patients or medical insurers.
The treatments will be performed by the medical team of Hadassah at the P-Cure Clinical Research and Development Center. The center will operate the patient intake and discharge, treatment planning and treatment delivery infrastructure. The center will have ambulatory services to treat complications in emergency situations. Initially, the treatments will be delivered to patients with brain, head and neck, thoracic, and pancreatic malignancies.
P-Cure has already received approval of the study by the Ethical Committee of the Hadassah and an approval of the Israeli Ministry of Health. P-Cure and Hadassah anticipate beginning treating patients in Fall 2022.
“We are excited by the opportunity to be the first provider of the most targeted type of radiation therapy for cancer patients in Israel. Until now the patients in Israel, who were found eligible for proton therapy, have to travel abroad. This has tremendous psychologic and economic burdens to the patient, their families, and the medical insurers in the country. Hadassah, together with P-Cure, will change the paradigm by providing this long awaited technology to all Israeli patients in need,” says Prof. Aron Popovtzer, the Director of Sharett Institute of Oncology at Hadassah Medical Center.
“It is a great honor for us to partner with Hadassah in providing this cutting-edge technology to cancer patients,” says Michael Marash, the P-Cure CEO. “Hadassah, affiliated with the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the institution whose first governors included Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein, is always at the forefront of the battle with cancer. This initiative is additional evidence of the clinical excellence which is the golden rule of this institution,” adds Marash.
Proton therapy has proven its clinical benefits since the first hospital-based proton center started treating patients 32 years ago. Specifically, proton therapy is more precise than any other form of radiation. Unlike x-ray treatment, with proton therapy there is small amount of entrance radiation, but virtually none travels beyond the tumor. This benefit of proton therapy results in eliminating many of the harmful side effects of radiation therapy, as well as allowing physicians to safely deliver higher doses of radiation to tumors.
However, even with the clinical benefits of proton therapy, there are only 112 operational centers world-wide. Less than 2% of the patients who can benefit from proton therapy have access to this advanced form of treatment. The limiting factor has been the cost of equipment and construction. The typical total cost of a completed single room center can be more than $50 million. “With a P-Cure solution, we eliminate the cost of construction and reduce by half the cost of equipment. The compact P-Cure system installed inside existing radiation oncology departments removes the economic barrier to offering more patients the benefits of proton therapy; and, this is in addition to the clinical benefits of proton therapy that will be generated by Prof. Popovtzer and his team in Israel,” says Marash.
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