HAMPTON, Va. – When several Hampton University alumni asked Hampton President William Harvey whether he was familiar with proton therapy for cancer patients, the veteran university chief said “no,” then took the alums’ friendly challenge to explore the topic. His initial readings sparked his interest.
Within a few months, Dr. Harvey was assigning widely respected Hampton nuclear physicist Dr. Cynthia Keppel to do more exploration. Soon, Harvey was more than up to speed. He had concluded his school should embrace proton therapy and began selling his board of trustees, then the lending community, on his ambitious idea of establishing a proton therapy treatment center at Hampton.
Today, the new $225 million Hampton University Proton Therapy Institute, one of eight therapy sites in the United States and the only one in the region, is open for business.
In operation for more than a year, the two-story, 98,000-square-foot facility is filled with state-of-the-art equipment and a professional staff of oncologists, nuclear physicists and engineers—some distinguished veterans and some ambitious rookies—recruited from around the country for their expertise and interest in proton therapy.
Working as a team, they have been helping cancer patients learn whether they (cancer patients) can employ proton therapy as an alternative to traditional therapeutic radiation and chemotherapy treatments in fighting the life-threatening disease. It focuses on treating adults with prostate, breast, lung and eye cancers and children with cancer.
“We dream no small dreams,” says Harvey, asserting that having such a major health care facility at a small college, particularly a historically Black college, marks a huge step for his and similar institutions. He says investing in the facility puts Hampton into the fight against cancer and asserts that the proton therapy facility will enhance the university’s educational programs in the sciences, support the city’s economy and provide a needed medical service to area citizens.
In exploring proton therapy early in the last decade, Hampton officials found more than a few reasons for getting more involved in the fight against cancer, including what they consider a high rate of deaths from colon cancer in nearby Chesapeake, Va., and a high number of deaths from prostate cancer in the Hampton Roads area. Asbestos was used heavily at the nearby Newport News shipyards, officials at the proton center note, but they say it is impossible to pinpoint precisely the source of these episodes of cancer.
