image: Corewell Health's Proton Therapy Center in Royal Oak, Michigan.
Credit: Emily Rose Bennett, Corewell Health
Southfield, Mich., Oct. 22, 2025 – Corewell Health physicians are researching cancer treatment advancements with a new, nearly $2.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. The four-year grant will help doctors potentially bring a type of proton beam technology, called dynamic SPArc (Spot-Scanning Proton Arc), into everyday patient care.
“Our goal is to make this therapy fast, accurate and ready for everyday use for a broad range of patients,” said Xuanfeng (Leo) Ding, Ph.D., medical physicist, Corewell Health William Beaumont University Hospital, who is leading the study.
His research team hopes to create the world’s first algorithm to help doctors design the most accurate and highly personalized treatment plan for individual patients. This dynamic technology also could allow physicians to deliver an exact dose of radiation to the precise spot needed, with even less variation than before, while protecting healthy tissue and organs nearby.
Previously, Corewell Health doctors treated the first U.S. patient with a “step-and-shoot” method and successfully eliminated a difficult salivary gland tumor, with only mild skin discoloration as a side effect. However, the treatment plan took weeks for physicians and their clinical teams to create, and each daily treatment frequently required the patient to stay still for more than 30 minutes.
“The number of proton therapy centers is still very limited across the U.S.,” Dr. Ding said. “We aim to reduce treatment time from 30 minutes to five, which is better for the patient and allows more people to have access to high-quality cancer care.”
Dynamic SPArc therapy uses a rotating arm, called a gantry, to deliver radiation in a smooth, continuous motion. Current therapies, like Intensity-Modulated Proton Therapy, offer better outcomes than traditional photon radiation therapy, but often involve pauses between each beam angle, which can slow down treatment. Dynamic SPArc potentially eliminates this issue.
To help speed things up even further, Dr. Ding’s team is working on a faster way to calculate the complex SPArc treatment plans as well.
“Each patient needs a custom plan,” Dr. Ding said. “Right now, these plans consist of thousands of proton energy layers and millions of proton spots to optimize and calculate, which is a significant computational effort even for modern advanced computers. We want to make that process much quicker while finding the best solution for the patient.”
According to Dr. Ding, dynamic SPArc therapy has significant clinical potential, and preliminary evidence shows that it is especially promising for treating complex cancers that affect the head-and-neck, brain, liver and lungs where critical organs are often located near a tumor.
“As we study and learn the unique features of the proton therapy system, we can bridge the knowledge gap between a more stationary treatment technology that’s available today and our novel dynamic treatment delivery system,” Dr. Ding said. “This project could be key to making SPArc therapy regularly available in clinics globally.”
The study includes researchers and experts from the University of Pennsylvania, Mayo Clinic, Northwestern University and the New York Proton Therapy Center.
For more information about Corewell Health’s proton therapy services, patients can call 248.551.2833.
About Corewell Health™
People are at the heart of everything we do, and the inspiration for our legacy of outstanding outcomes, innovation, strong community partnerships, philanthropy and transparency. Corewell Health is a not-for-profit health system that provides health care and coverage with an exceptional team of 60,000+ dedicated people—including more than 11,500 physicians and advanced practice providers and more than 16,000 nurses providing care and services in 21 hospitals, 300+ outpatient locations and several post-acute facilities—and Priority Health, a provider-sponsored health plan serving more than 1.3 million members. Through experience and collaboration, we are reimagining a better, more equitable model of health and wellness. For more information, visit corewellhealth.org.
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