A native born and trained Brazilian oncologist is in the forefront of a new era in the treatment of cancer patients with cutting edge proton therapy medical technology developed in Israelby P-Cure.
Dr. Marcel Fang was born in Santos-SP and has lived all his life in Sao Paulo-Brazil. He graduated in Radiation Oncology at Dr. Arnaldo Vieira de Carvalho Cancer Institute in 2010.
For several years he worked in leadership positions to expand a model of radiotherapy care focused on high technical quality in order to bring advanced radiotherapy techniques to a portion of the Brazilian population that previously did not have this opportunity. After the success of spreading this model of radiotherapy care throughout several Brazilian states, he decided to move with his family to Israel.
For the past year, Dr. Fang has been working in the Radiotherapy Department at the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem. During the same year, Hadassah, in partnership with the Israeli company P-Cure, began to offer proton therapy services using the P-Cure Solution for delivering the most targeted type of radiation treatment to Israeli cancer patients. The center is the only available proton facility in the Middle East.
Proton is a highly accurate form of radiotherapy that uses a proton beam, a charged particle, to destroy tumor cells in a highly precise and effective way. Unlike photon beams (X-rays), which deposits its maximum energy as it enters the body, a proton beam it deposits a very high dose in the tumor region and a minimal dose in the healthy tissue regions. This characteristic allows for highly effective treatment with significantly reduced side effects.
“Bringing proton therapy to developing countries such as Brazil is difficult because the medical insurance reimbursement is insufficient to make the business model viable; yet, the number of cancer patients is enormous. The main barrier to installing new technologies in countries like Brazil is cost effectiveness. The Unified Health System (SUS) is saturated and has a very high cost. Brazil’s supplementary health system also has little reserve for expanding procedures,” says Dr. Fang.
“Proton therapy has proven to be effective and has a low side-effect profile, but the proton solutions previously available made its cost-effectiveness the biggest impediment to new installations in Brazil. One of the main advantages of the solution presented by P-Cure is that it is the most affordable solution on the market, but even more important, is the fact that proton therapy allows treatment with fewer side effects, thus placing less of a burden on health systems over the years and allowing patients to return to their jobs more quickly,” says Dr. Fang.
In the past 10 years, there has been a large expansion in radiotherapy centers using proton therapy for more indications due to the possibility of protecting healthy tissue. Proton therapy is currently used for the treatment of brain, spine, head and neck, pediatric, ocular, liver, lung, prostate, breast cancers, sarcomas and other benign tumors.