Siemens’s Cancer Therapy Faces Roadblocks

Inside a compound with eight-foot-thick walls and armor-plated doors, Hans Dieter Schmitz lies strapped to a carbon-fiber stretcher, where a tumor in his head is bombarded with carbon ions at more than half the speed of light. The beam attacks cancer cells considered too risky to remove surgically while sparing healthy tissue. For Schmitz, the therapy may be his last hope.

The stakes for Siemens, which made much of the equipment, aren’t life or death, but the engineering giant has plenty riding on the treatment. Siemens has spent more than $1 billion on the technology, called particle therapy. It differs from other radiation treatment in that it uses carbon ions. These are smaller than the protons and photons typically employed to kill cancer cells, so they can be targeted more accurately. The site where Schmitz is a patient, in the southern German city of Heidelberg, is the only one of its kind, shooting both ions and photons to give doctors a range of treatment options. Although exhaustive clinical studies haven’t yet been completed, Rhön Klinikum, a Siemens partner in the technology, claims the system can cure more than 90 percent of some cancers.