UK’s first NHS high-energy proton beam facility

With the UK’s first high-energy Proton Beam Therapy Centre set to open next year at Manchester’s The Christie, young patients with head and neck tumours, cancers close to the skull or spine, or a variety of soft tissue tumours, and adults with cancers difficult to treat using ‘conventional’ photon-based radiotherapy will, for the first time, be able to receive NHS proton beam therapy (PBT) without having to travel overseas. HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, visited the site of The Christie’s new £135 million PBT Centre to find out more about the design and construction of a facility which Interserve construction director for the North-West, Phil Shaw, describes as one of the most complex and specialist he has worked on.

The Christie is Europe’s largest single site cancer centre, and, as the lead cancer centre for the Greater Manchester and Cheshire Cancer Network, serves a population of 3.2 million. It also runs clinics at 16 other general hospitals, and has a mobile chemotherapy unit which visits sites such as supermarket car parks to save patients having to travel large distances for treatment. The Christie NHS Foundation Trust registers around 12,500 new patients, and treats about 44,000, every year, with the hospital and its satellite facilities treating a wide range of cancers via a combination of surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, brachytherapy, stem cell treatment, palliative and supportive care, and endocrinology. When the new Proton Beam Therapy Centre opens next summer, it will be the UK’s first facility to use high-energy proton beam therapy to treat cancers in both children and adults that are considered more difficult to target using photon-based radiotherapy due to their proximity to major organs and easily damaged tissue.

Seeking to be the European leader