Speaker
Description
The University of Cape Town is leading the project to establish a proton therapy facility in Cape Town, near to both the Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital and Groote Schuur Hospital [1]. Proton therapy centres (new and proposed) are few in the Southern Hemisphere and absent from the African continent, besides the newly established centre in Cairo, within a context where most of the population of Africa are children, and the rate of paediatric cancer cases is increasing faster than anywhere else in the world. Proton therapy ceased at iThemba LABS in Cape Town over a decade ago.
The proton therapy centre in Cape Town will also include a secondary facility for the production of short-lived radioisotopes for nuclear medicine, and beam lines for research in physics, engineering, neuroscience, radiation metrology and radiobiology.
We present a status report on the project and our vision for the facility for the whole of South Africa and the region more broadly.
[1] https://protontherapy.uct.ac.za
