Provision Healthcare has signed a joint agreement with the Tianjin Taishan Cancer Hospital (International Personalized Cancer Center, “IPCC”) in northern China to build the first and only proton therapy center in the free trade zone. The agreement will also develop a training facility for medical providers as part of Provision’s global expansion strategy.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) released recommendations that provide a framework for a bold and transformative Alzheimer’s disease research agenda. Developed at the recent Alzheimer’s Disease Research Summit 2015: Path to Treatment and Prevention, the recommendations provide the wider Alzheimer’s research community with a strategy for speeding the development of effective interventions for Alzheimer’s and related dementias.

New technology developed at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) may extend the benefits of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to many patients whose access to MRI is currently limited. A redesign of the wire at the core of the leads carrying signals between implanted medical devices and their target structures significantly reduces the generation of heat that occurs when standard wires are exposed to the radiofrequency (RF) energy used in MRI. The novel system is described in a paper published in the online Nature journal Scientific Reports.

The American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) is issuing a new guideline, “Definitive and adjuvant radiotherapy in locally advanced non-small cell lung cancer: An American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) evidence-based clinical practice guideline.” The guideline’s executive summary is published in the May-June issue of Practical Radiation Oncology (PRO), ASTRO’s clinical practice journal. The complete guideline, which cites 35 years of data to help guide current treatment and future research, is available online as an open-access article in PRO. The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) issued an endorsement of ASTRO’s guideline.

NorthStar Medical Radioisotopes LLC has completed its first production-scale test run of the molybdenum-99 (Mo-99) aliquoting system installed at the University of Missouri Research Reactor (MURR) in Columbia, Missouri. The test and subsequent shipment of the resulting Mo-99 to NorthStar’s Madison facility is another milestone in the establishment of domestic production of the vital medical radioisotope.