Scheduled to open in northwest Oklahoma City in June 2009, the piece of equipment’s arrival is a milestone for the 55,000-square foot therapy center. The cyclotron provides an alternative to radiation therapy for cancer patients. When completed, the center will feature four proton treatment rooms and will provide access to as many as 1,500 cancer patients per year. Proton therapy is considered the most advanced form of external radiation therapy available for treating cancer.

“With the arrival of the cyclotron we’re just a year out now from opening the doors. We broke ground in the spring of last year. We’re a little more than midway through at this point with the patients being able to be treated with Proton Therapy this next summer,” John Donaghue, national vice-president financial operations ProCure Treatment Centers Inc., said at an arrival ceremony. “The next phase is really the most sophisticated and the most difficult. It requires us to take the Proton accelerator and align and calibrate the beam of energy that will actually be sent down the side of the building and be partitioned off into the patient treatment rooms where it’s been conformed into the three dimensional size of the tumor and precisely target it to the tumor within the patient. So the calibration that’s required is within millimeters of preciseness.”

The cyclotron, weighing as much as a Boeing 747 jet, was manufactured in Belgium by IBA, a world-leader in cancer technology. The cyclotron traveled four weeks and about 5,700 miles by sea, arriving first in Houston. A trailer traveled at a top speed of 45 mph during a nearly 500-mile journey to the Oklahoma City center. Half of the cyclotron arrived on Saturday. The trailer will now return to Houston to bring the second half of the cyclotron to Oklahoma City.