Targeted cancer treatment
Radiotherapy (radiation therapy) has an important place in the treatment of cancer patients. About 40 to 50% of all patients with cancer are treated with radiotherapy at some point during their course of treatment, be it as monotherapy or in combination with chemotherapy and/or targeted drugs. The majority of patients receiving radiotherapy is treated with curative intention. However, radiation therapy also plays an important role in the alleviation of complaints in a palliative setting.
Despite the great progress in radiotherapy over the past years, it remains difficult to completely spare healthy tissue surrounding the tumour with conventional radiotherapy. Proton therapy can offer a solution for this as it reduces the radiation damage to healthy tissue.
Read more about how proton therapy works and its benefits.
Research
In the new proton therapy centre also research will be performed in order to further develop proton therapy.
The research includes both clinical and fundamental research and will be performed in cooperation with the industry.
Read more about research in the proton centre.
Collaboration
The University Hospitals Leuven, the KU Leuven, the University Hospital Saint-Luc and the UCL invest in a brand new treatment and research centre for proton therapy. This will be done in collaboration with UZ Gent, UZA and UZ Brussel and is supported by a number of regional hospitals and other research institutes.
This interuniversity project was named ParTICLe, which stands for “Particle Therapy Interuniversity Centre Leuven”.
Read more about the collaboration.
About the construction and the device
Contact
Do you still have questions about proton therapy or the proton centre? Let us know.