Plans for Particle Therapy in Sweden

A national project for a Swedish Proton Therapy Centre (SPTC) supported by the Swedish university hospitals was formed in 2003. The aim of the SPTC project was to build a national proton therapy centre focused on combining patient treatment and clinical research. The centre was to be operated under the principle of shared governance and distributed competence meaning that the preparations before radiotherapy were to be performed at the collaborating university hospitals. In 2006 the political majorities in all Swedish counties with university hospitals decided to form a common body, the “Joint Authority of County Councils for Advanced Radiation Therapy” with the aim of building a national particle therapy facility. In early 2007 it was decided to build a proton facility with land reserved for a possible future expansion to light ions. The facility will be operated under the shared governance – distributed competence principle and it will be located in close proximity to the University Hospital in Uppsala. The facility has been named the Skandion Clinic. At the moment the project is in the process of procuring a complete proton therapy facility under a turnkey contract and a call for tenders has recently been submitted. The intention is to sign a contract in 2008. The plan is to start patient treatments in 2011. THE SWEDISH PROTON THERAPY EXPERIENCE Proton beam radiotherapy has a long tradition in Sweden. The proton beam of the synchrocyclotron at the Gustaf Werner Institute in Uppsala was used for patient treatments between 1957 and 1973. After a long period of accelerator and laboratory reconstruction, patient treatments were resumed in 1989 at the T Svedberg Laboratory (TSL). To date close to 800 patients have been treated, where the main target localisations are intracranial lesions and prostate cancer. Until 2005 the number of treatment weeks available for radiotherapy was limited to one week per month. From 2006 the number of treatment weeks has increased to 35 per year. Although the beam time availability is good the limitations of the treatment unit at TSL have gradually become more hampering. The treatment unit has one fixed horizontal beam line, the maximum proton range is 20 cm in water and the limited field size attainable with passive scattering severely restricts the number of possible target locations. THE DEDICATED NATIONAL PARTICLE THERAPY CENTRE