A key milestone
ProCure gets cyclotron to battle cancer

Officials with ProCure held a brief ceremony to mark the milestone arrival of the first half of the massive cyclotron, which will split the atom and accelerate cancer-fighting protons to nearly the speed of light.

"Today marks an important event as we have the cyclotron delivered here,” said John Donaghue, vice president of national financial operations for ProCure Treatment Centers. "The arrival of the cyclotron really represents a key milestone for ProCure. It represents and marks a record-breaking 27-month timeline we have set up on this wonderful facility.”

The cyclotron traveled 5,700 miles across the Atlantic Ocean by ship and then 500 miles over three days from Houston to Oklahoma City on a specially built 11-axle tractor-trailer.

The caravan that included the tractor-trailer and support vehicles avoided the Interstate highways and had a top speed of 45 miles per hour on the trip north. ProCure officials had to obtain special permits to bring the heavy equipment up from Houston.

A second, slightly lighter piece of the cyclotron will be trucked to Oklahoma City in the next couple of weeks, where it will be assembled before undergoing calibration and testing in anticipation of a summer 2009 opening of the ProCure Treatment Center.

Calibration of the "beam line” that runs from the cyclotron to the patient treatment rooms provides the most complicated challenge in bringing the center online, Donaghue said.

"The technology requires you to have millimeter preciseness in the beam line all the way down the side of building as it partitions off for treatment,” Donaghue said.