Consortium to Construct Particle Therapy Center in Germany

The first particle therapy center (PTC) in Northern Germany to serve as a competence center for tumor diseases will be providing new treatment possibilities for cancer therapy starting in 2012. In addition to Northern Germany, the center is intended to serve the entire Southern Scandinavian region.

In its final stage of completion, the facility's three treatment rooms will be capable of treating approximately 3000 patients with particles per year. Siemens Healthcare (Erlangen, Germany; www.medical.siemens.com) announces that the University Clinic of Schleswig-Holstein (UC S-H; Germany) commissioned a consortium of bidders, including Siemens and others, with the construction and operation of the first PTC in Northern Germany. With overall costs of approximately 250 million euros, this represents the largest public private partnership project (PPP) ever launched in the German healthcare sector.

The contract concluded between the consortium of bidders and the UC S-H includes the financing, construction, technical operation, and maintenance of the particle therapy facility in a public private partnership over a period of 25 years. To implement this project, the sponsors, Siemens Project Ventures and Bilfinger Berger Project Investments (Senningerberg, Luxembourg), established a project company that will be refinanced via an international group of banks. In addition to the facilities for applying particle therapy (PT), the PTC will also include a department for conventional radiation therapy. Conventional radiation therapy is planned to begin at the end of 2011, and the PT facility should be started up at the beginning of 2012.

Siemens will perform the planning and construction of the particle therapy system, supply medical engineering services for medical diagnostics to information technology, and carry out the technical service and operation of the medical engineering systems. Bilfinger Berger Hochbau will be responsible for the turnkey construction of the center. The Hamburg (Germany) branch will complete the building with four aboveground stories and two underground stories within 24 months.

In particle therapy, protons or carbon ions are accelerated to a very high speed by an accelerator system and then applied precisely to the target tissue. Calculation and control with high precision enable more accurate irradiation of tumors than with earlier techniques, while avoiding unnecessary treatment of the surrounding healthy tissue. Due to its accuracy, this technique is especially suited for types of cancer, which are difficult to access or located close to organs at risk (e.g., tumors located at the base of the skull or brain tumors). Other applications include soft tissue sarcomas and prostate carcinomas surrounded by sensitive tissue.

Approximately 50,000 patients have already been treated with particles worldwide. Of these, more than 3000 have been treated with carbon ions. Only a combined system that also enables the use of various ion types, in addition to protons, can meet current requirements for the efficient treatment of a broad range of tumors.


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