Pediatric Proton Therapy Center
For your child with cancer, you choose treatments not just because they are effective but because they are safe and limit long-term effects. Proton therapy’s greatest benefit is the ability to deliver radiation doses directly to your child’s tumors, minimizing damage to surrounding healthy tissue. The Cancer Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) offers one of the most established and experienced pediatric proton therapy programs, in collaboration with Penn Medicine at the Roberts Proton Therapy Center. It was the first facility of its kind, designed specifically with children in mind.
Proton Therapy Lowers Treatment Side Effects in Pediatric Head and Neck Cancer Patients
Pediatric patients with head and neck cancer can be treated with proton beam therapy instead of traditional photon radiation, resulting in similar outcomes.
Why Choose Us?
When deciding where to take your child for proton therapy, you have a lot of options. When making the decision about this critical phase of your child’s treatment, there are a few things to consider. To name a few — the experience of the center, level of access and convenience of having all of your world-class pediatric subspecialists on a single medical campus, focus on the child’s anesthesia experience, and availability of child-friendly spaces and resources.
Conditions We Treat
- Brain and Central Nervous System Tumors
- Astrocytoma
- Atypical teratoid rhabdoid tumors (ATRT)
- Craniopharyngioma
- Ependymoma
- Germ cell tumors (choriocarcinoma, teratoma, germinoma)
- Glioma (glioblastoma, low-grade glioma)
- Medulloblastoma
- Meningioma
- Optic nerve tumors
- Optic pathway/hypothalamic glioma
- Pinoblastoma
- Primitive neuro-ectodermal tumor (intracranial PNET)
- Solid Tumors
- Chondrosarcoma
- Chordoma
- Ewing sarcoma
- Head and neck carcinomas (parotid, nasopharyngeal)
- Neuroblastoma
- Osteosarcoma
- Retinoblastoma
- Rhabdomyosarcoma (and other soft tissue sarcomas)
- Soft tissue sarcomas (rhabdomyosarcoma, leiomyosarcoma, liposarcoma, fibrosarcoma, synovial sarcoma)
- Tumors of the head and neck
- Wilms' tumor
- Lymphoma
- Hodgkin
- Non-Hodgkin
Our Programs and Services
Our Team
The Proton Therapy team includes pediatric oncologists, radiation oncologists, anesthesiologists, physicists, dosimetrists, nurses, radiation therapists, child life therapists and other medical professionals who understand the unique needs of children with cancer.
