Jacksonville, Fla.-Exactly one month to the day that a Belgian cargo ship delivered the University of Florida’s state-of-the-art proton beam equipment to Jacksonville, another project milestone will occur.
Beginning at 8 a.m. Thursday (3/17), trucks will arrive at JAXPORT to load up the cyclotron-the proton beam system’s heaviest component, which was delivered to the port Feb. 17 and unloaded Feb. 18 with the rest of the biomedical machinery for UF’s cutting-edge cancer therapy facility.
The cyclotron – the heart of the system – is housed in two crates totaling 484,000 pounds that will be transported slowly and carefully about six miles from the port to the Shands Jacksonville campus. JSO officers will escort the oversized load along a route that begins on Talleyrand Ave. and ends at Jefferson St. and W. 10th St., adjacent to Shands Jacksonville. The trek will take all day, with the first crate expected to arrive on campus at 11 a.m.
That first crate, which contains the bottom half of the cyclotron, will take 2 hours to unpack. At 1 p.m. a gigantic crane will lift that half of the cyclotron into the Florida Proton Therapy Institute site through openings in the building’s ceiling. The cyclotron’s top half should be on site by 2 p.m. and will be mounted on top of the first half. By the end of the day, the cyclotron will be installed and the ceiling openings sealed.
“Even installing the crane to lift the cyclotron halves into the building was tricky,” said Vincent Collignon, project site manager for Ion Beam Application (IBA), the Belgian manufacturer of UF’s revolutionary proton beam system. Installed on Wednesday (3/16), the crane arrived on 12 trucks that also required oversized load precautions. “Installation of the crane started at 8 a.m., and six hours later it was in place and operational,” he explained. “It will take all day Friday (3/18) to dismount it.”
The system is revolutionary in the treatment of cancer because it uses proton beams instead of X-rays. Proton therapy delivers very tightly defined high doses of radiation to destroy tumors, with little or no damage to adjacent healthy tissues.
UF’s proton therapy center will be equipped with three treatment rooms and a research room, all connected to the 230-MeV (mega-electron volt) cyclotron. The cyclotron accelerates positively charged protons that a beam transport system then guides to three gantries in the treatment rooms. Each gantry weighs 330,000 pounds (150 Metric tons).
So far, the installation project is on schedule. Day “zero” for equipment installation was March 9, according to Collignon, with rigging of the cyclotron taking place Thursday (3/17). The rest of the equipment-in 51 crates and 19 containers-will begin to be uncrated and assembled by Monday (3/21), starting with the beam line and gantry no. 1, says Collignon. Assembly of gantry no. 2 will start six weeks later and of gantry no. 3 six weeks after that.
“When the equipment arrived at JAXPORT last month, it was packed in 19 containers and 53 big crates-including 17 crates per gantry and two crates for the cyclotron,” said Collignon. “We estimate the crates and containers will require one truck each, which translates to 72 trucks taking the same slow, careful route over the next few months.”
When it’s completed in mid-year 2006 at a total cost of $100 million, UF’s proton beam therapy facility will be the only one in the Southeast. Currently the treatment is available only at Loma Linda University in California, Massachusetts General Hospital and at Indiana University. The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center plans to open a proton therapy facility within two years.
For more information on the proton beam equipment, please visit the UF Proton Therapy Institute website.