Planet Prostate

Planet Prostate

T&I Sarasota/Bradenton Runner-up

by Mark Gordon | Managing Editor

High prices and high technology collide in this ultra-focused cancer treatment facility.

If technological innovation has a price tag, then consider the Dattoli Cancer Center is perennial gold: The Sarasota-based prostate cancer-only treatment facility utilizes some of the best, and priciest, equipment in the world.

Take its linear accelerator. The machine is used for dispensing a type of treatment known as intensity-modulated radiation therapy, or IMRT, by which a patient receives daily treatments designed to attack specific, pre-mapped parts of the cancer.

Dattoli is one of the only non-hospital facilities in the country to use a linear accelerator, which in recent years has become both a top-level, industry-wide prostate cancer fighting tool as well as the lifeblood of the center, a few miles from downtown Sarasota. IMRT treatment is considered the best non-surgery option in fighting prostate cancer.

The IMRT machine, though, comes with a $1.5 million-plus price tag. And that's just for the machine. That doesn't include software upgrades and maintenance, which can be more than $100,000 a year.

Plus, the Dattoli Center has two linear accelerators. The second one, which it bought in 2006, uses an even more advanced form of treatment called dynamic adaptive radiation therapy (DART). Says Virginia Carnahan, Dattoli's marketing director: "We are the Rolls Royce of IMRTs."

The expensive car analogies - the center spent nearly $4 million on equipment before it even opened in 2001 - are apropos for other parts of the facility, too, in both equipment and attitude. For instance, it uses its medical software as a pipeline for maintaining and improving patient treatment, as information is shared regularly by several professionals along the treatment journey, from blood technicians to radiation therapists to doctors.

What's more, the center has a 3D Color Flow Doppler Ultrasound machine, another expensive, and essential, piece of cancer-fighting equipment that's also not commonly seen in other treatment centers. The ultrasound pinpoints the location of suspect areas of the prostate gland while the color aspect makes it easy to read and analyze.

The Dattoli center's dual focus on technology and a literal laser-like approach on treating just prostate cancer has made the facility, officially called the Dattoli Cancer Center & Brachytherapy Research Institute, one of the most sought-after and respected treatment facilities in the world.

The center treats about 50 to 60 people a day, which is about 500 patients over a year's time, as IMRT plans last about a month per each patient. About half of the patients are from Florida, while the other half make up a wide-ranging national and global list, from Hawaii and Alaska to England, Saudi Arabia and Uruguay.

Dr. Michael Dattoli and Dr. Richard Sorace, longtime oncologists who had been searching for a non-surgical prostate cancer treatment plan that defeats the disease without destroying the patient's quality of life, co-founded the center in 2001. The doctors took care of the medical side, while Don Kaltenbach, a prostate cancer survivor and lawyer, ran the business side.

The doctors' goal was to combine high-tech treatments with brachytherapy, a form of radiotherapy where a radioactive source is placed directly into the tumor. In prostate cancer treatment, brachytherapy involves inserting tiny titanium-made seeds into a patient's prostate.

Says Kaltenbach: "In prostate cancer treatment, there are certain key players, and this center is definitely one of those."

REVIEW SUMMARY

Business: Dattoli Cancer Center, Sarasota

Industry: Health care

Key: The center makes technology a big part of every patient's treatment plan.