In 2025, Mayo Clinic in Florida finished construction on the Duan Family Building. A pioneering investment in integrated cancer care for our patients, the 225,000-square-foot, $233 million building will offer a range of options for individualized care and personalized radiotherapy. In addition to carbon ion therapy, a powerful new option for resistant cancers, the facility will offer proton therapy and conventional X-ray therapy.
This represents an expansion on Mayo Clinic’s work with proton beam therapy, which will soon be available on every campus. But how does proton therapy work, and how is it different from other types of radiation therapies?
Proton therapy is a type of radiation treatment that uses protons, the positively charged particle found in the nucleus of atoms, to precisely target cancer. Using a particle accelerator, clinicians can direct a beam of protons into a tumor. This allows the protons to release their energy within the target, which minimizes the amount of radiation hitting healthy tissue, leading to fewer treatment side effects. Within tumor cells, the protons damage the DNA of the cancer, breaking up the chromosomes to kill the cells.
The damage can be precisely targeted because protons deposit most of their energy at a specific depth, known as the Bragg peak. Using sophisticated visualization and targeting tools, care teams can adjust the location of the Bragg peak to pinpoint the tumor. Although low doses are released as the protons enter the body, radiation dose falls off very rapidly beyond the location of the Bragg peak, eliminating much of the radiation dose on the other side. This precision reduces damage to surrounding tissue and is important for treating cancers that are near sensitive areas of the body.
Radiation therapy is common in cancer care — about half of people diagnosed with invasive cancers in the U.S. will undergo some radiation treatment. Conventional radiation therapy is the most common therapy option and is available at most cancer treatment centers. This type of radiation therapy uses X-rays, which kill cancer cells using high-energy photons.
While X-ray therapy is highly effective for treating many cancers, X-rays enter and exit more gradually and do not stop at a certain depth. The dose to nearby normal body organs is often higher, which can make it challenging to treat tumors in certain parts of the body. Some cancers are radioresistant and don’t respond well to conventional radiation therapy.
On the other end of the spectrum is carbon ion therapy, which uses a beam of carbon ions to target tumors. Carbon ions are bigger and more massive than protons, which means they are highly effective at killing cancer cells. Carbon ion therapy is a good option for patients for whom other types of radiation therapy have failed. However, carbon ion therapy requires significant specialized infrastructure and is not widely available. It is currently only available in 15 centers across Asia and Europe. The carbon ion facility at the Duan Family Building at Mayo Clinic in Florida will be the first clinical carbon ion radiation therapy center of its kind on the North American continent.
Proton therapy represents a middle ground between conventional radiation therapy and carbon ion therapy. It is more widely available than carbon ion therapy and is good for addressing radioresistant tumors, with more precision and reduced effects on the surrounding tissue when compared to X-ray therapy.
Proton therapy is available at a growing number of centers across the U.S., including all three Mayo Clinic campuses in Rochester, Minnesota; Phoenix, Arizona; and Jacksonville, Florida, beginning in 2027.
Mayo Clinic has been at the forefront of cancer therapy innovation for over two decades, with its radiation oncologists and physicists continuously advancing radiation treatment techniques and protocols. The expansion of proton therapy to all three campuses reflects Mayo Clinic’s commitment to making cutting-edge radiation treatments accessible to patients nationwide. Scientists and clinicians also leverage these comprehensive tools to conduct clinical trials and research into optimizing proton therapy for various cancer types, including pediatric cancers, where minimizing radiation exposure to developing tissues is critical.
The integration of proton therapy with Mayo Clinic's new carbon ion capabilities at the Florida campus creates new opportunities for personalized care strategies. This dual-modality approach will allow care teams to select the most appropriate radiation therapy for each patient's specific cancer type, location and treatment history. This investment in advanced radiation therapy technologies positions Mayo Clinic to offer patients the most comprehensive radiation therapy options available anywhere in North America.
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