My Medical Suitcase has federated a network of partner care centres throughout France. All Centres are authorised by the Regional Health Agencies (ARS – Agences Régionales de Santé) to treat cancer patients with radiotherapy, and are subject to regular inspections by the Nuclear Safety Authority (ASN – Autorité de Sûreté Nucléaire), thus guaranteeing compliance with patient radiation protection standards.
All types of cancer can be treated according to medical best practices and current recommendations established by the learned societies of radiotherapy and national and international experts.
Each Centre is usually equipped with at least two to three innovative machines marketed by the different main manufacturers, allowing the delivery of high-tech treatments such as dynamic arc therapy and radiotherapy in stereotactic conditions. These ultra-precise techniques make it possible to increase the dose per session and improve the target coverage while simultaneously reducing coverage of neighbouring organs (heart, lung, brain stem, spinal cord, rectum), thus improving local management of the disease by reducing the duration of treatments and their toxicities.
Dynamic arc therapy consists of delivering the X-ray dose to the target by modulating the radiation therapy dose at all times thanks to the permanent rotation of the machine arm around the patient and the synchronous change in the beam’s shape. This technique is used in daily practice in the My Medical Suitcase reference Centres.
Stereotactic radiotherapy is used for ablative purposes (that is, aiming to remove or destroy permanently) to treat small targets or multiple targets such as certain primary tumours of the lung or liver or metastases in the bone, liver, brain or lung. This technique makes it possible to offer an effective low-toxicity medical solution with curative intent to patients with small lung cancers who are ineligible for surgery for medical reasons (heart failure, respiratory failure, or other antecedents that limit anaesthesia) and thus far, a curative treatment. It also opens new perspectives for curative treatment of patients in an oligometastatic situation (with a low number of metastases, generally less than 5), which, until now, could only be treated with chemotherapy by completing the treatment with the destruction of the residual targets initiated by the systemic treatment. The recent scientific results of the SABR-COMET trial published in The Lancet in 2019 have shown the benefit of this technique in these patients, both in terms of efficacy (overall survival) and feasibility (low toxicity), regardless of the primary cancer.
All these innovations, available in My Medical Suitcase partner Centres, are new treatment options and improve patients’ quality of life and survival every day.
