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Rigshospitalet wants to start particle therapy

There is a strong wish to be able to offer cancer patients a new type of radiation therapy; a treatment that may especially benefit children with cancer.

Traditional radiation therapy helps cure or extend the life of many cancer patients each year.

However, radiation therapy is still connected with a certain amount of risk as it may also affect healthy tissue or organs around the tumour subjected to radiation. In particular, this poses problems for children with cancer who later in life have 20-30 per cent risk of developing a new form of cancer because of radiation therapy given during childhood.

The new particle therapy enables radiation with protons or light ions and also radiation of the tumour, with great precision so as to avoid affecting surrounding tissue and organs. For children with cancer, this means that the number of new cancer cases due to radiation is reduced to less than 2 per cent.

A great demand
Currently, Danish children with cancer are being sent abroad to receive particle therapy treatment because as yet the treatment is not available in Denmark. However, waiting times abroad are long, and most children therefore receive traditional radiation therapy in Denmark. This means that each year up to 2,000 Danish cancer patients would benefit from particle therapy and we expect higher demand together with the increasing number of cancer patients and better treatment opportunities.

The DANLITE group from the Department of Radiation Oncology at Rigshospitalet is a national initiative focusing on establishing a particle therapy facility for cancer treatment in Denmark.

This facility is necessary for Denmark to consolidate its international position within radiation therapy and associated research.