Worcester Business Journal

12 Worcester Business Journal • September 28, 2015 www.wbjournal.com China pact to boost manufacturing and marketing FOCUS Manufacturing Mevion beams in on cancer treatment BY CHRISTINA P. O'NEILL Special to the Worcester Business Journal In 2007, he met with Still River Systems (renamed Mevion Medical Systems in 2011), to seek to solve the problem. He subsequently saw that the company had signed on several large providers which had the resources to do due diligence before buying, and in 2008, Ackerman Cancer Center signed up with Mevion for an S250 proton therapy device. Delivery, expected in 2011, occurred in 2013, Ackerman said, but the system has since proved its value, he said. For certain types of cancer — local- ized, hard to reach, irregularly shaped, and near vital organs — proton therapy is more effective than radiation therapy because its targeted approach spares healthy tissue. The proton beam does not go all the way through the body, but stops at the cancerous site. For breast cancer patients with localized tumors, heart tissue is undamaged, and for brain cancer patients, cognitive func- tion can be spared, Ackerman said. Mevion Medical Systems, based in Littleton, with international offices in Japan and the United Kingdom, devel- ops and manufactures proton therapy systems. The advantages of its system compared to others is its small foot- print, lower cost and lower energy usage than traditional systems, which take up the equivalent of a football field and cost hundreds of millions of dol- lars. The Mevion system gives clini- cians the ability to treat as many patients in three months as bigger sys- tems do in a year. ACC, the first physi- cian-owned practice to install proton therapy, increased its staffing as a result of an increase in patient volume. "We went from a few patients a day to capac- ity," Ackerman said, operating from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. with testing and mainte- nance done at night. B ack in the early 2000s, Dr. Scot Ackerman wanted to offer proton therapy, the oncological silver bullet, to the cancer patients in his private physician practice in Florida. But in those days, there were only two or three proton therapy suppliers – and both the cost and the square footage needed to install a proton therapy treat- ment were prohibitive, taking up 150 to 200 million square feet with a single cyclotron. Only big hospitals and universities had the space and the funding to acquire a system. Ackerman is medical director of Ackerman Cancer Center (ACC), a private-practice oncology physicians' group in Jacksonville, Fla. "We have two freestanding offices. I looked for a solution that would fit into our office and none existed," he said. The Mevion S250 fits in a far smaller space than other proton therapy treatments (staged photo, courtesy Mevion Medical Systems Inc.) P H O T O / C O U R T E S Y

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