ProCure opens $12M training facility

By Jim Stafford

Published: May 21, 2008

While drawing up plans to build a $100 million proton therapy center in Oklahoma City, ProCure Treatment Center executives discovered a disturbing reality about the industry: There was no place to train employees before actually shooting beams of proton radiation into the bodies of cancer patients.

"It was amazing to me as a businessman to find out that people were investing hundreds of millions of dollars in proton therapy centers and they open up the doors and then they train their people,” said Hadley Ford, ProCure's chief executive officer. "It would be a little bit like having a 747 show up and then you train your pilot.”

So, ProCure built the world's first proton training center in Bloomington, Ind., where the company's corporate headquarters is based. The $12 million simulator opened last fall and classes already have been conducted there.

Ford spoke to the downtown Rotary Club on Tuesday, describing the training center as a simulator that offers everything but actual protons for dosemetrists, medical physicists and radiation therapists who will train at the site.

"We've got treatment planning; we have a CT scanner; it's like a Disney World gantry,” he said.

"You walk in and it looks like a real gantry room but there is nothing behind it. It's a simulator, so we can simulate all the patient (treatment) with software.”

ProCure expects to open the proton therapy center in northwest Oklahoma City in July 2009.

It will be the first proton treatment center opened by the company founded in 2005. Other centers are planned or under review at sites in Florida, Illinois and Michigan. The company has attracted more than $300 million in equity investment, including $70 million from a group of Oklahoma City investors led by energy executive Aubrey McClendon.

ProCure recently took possession of a 200-ton cyclotron in Oklahoma City that will generate the proton beams and hurl them into the cancerous tumors of patients at two-thirds the speed of light.

"The cyclotron is really the heart and soul, and it arrived about a week ago,” Ford said. "The next big milestone is actually getting a beam out of the cyclotron.”

The proton center is on an 18-acre campus at Memorial Road and MacArthur Boulevard, which also will be home to the Integris Cancer Institute of Oklahoma. Ground breaking on the adjacent Integris cancer center will be at 4 p.m. Tuesday. The center will employ about 200 people. Construction of the center will take about 18 months, said Stanley Hupfeld, president and chief executive of Integris Health.

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