Despite having no medical school, Hampton University is one of the leading research institutions on cancer treatment.

With a top-rated medical physics program and a faculty team that has nine patents on a breast cancer detection device, university president William R. Harvey says it’s time to make an even bigger investment into fighting cancer.

Thanks to Harvey’s desire to make cancer research one of the university’s top priorities, Hampton is set to unveil its own proton treatment center. The Hampton University Proton Therapy Institute (HUPTI) will be the largest, first free-standing, and, according to university officials, the most state-of-the-art cancer treatment center in the nation. It will only be the seventh proton institute in the nation, and the first to be built at a historically Black college or university.

The project’s costs could exceed $200 million, but Harvey says the institute’s value in fighting cancer cannot be measured in numbers.

“Cancer is such a plague on society … it’s also a health disparity issue,” he says. “This is something that will ease human misery and save lives.”

The institute could have special importance in Virginia, particularly in the university’s own backyard. According to the Virginia Cancer Registry, one out of every three people in Virginia will get cancer at some point in life, with higher rates for Black women than White women.

Hampton Roads also leads the nation in prostate cancer deaths, and Black men have significantly higher rates of prostate cancer than White men.

“When you add all of that together, the question becomes not so much why [build the institute], but why not sooner,” Harvey says.

Before proton therapy, cancer patients generally had three treatment options: radiation, chemotherapy or surgery. Radiation sends a radioactive beam (the same beam used for mammograms and X-rays) through the infected cells to prevent them from regenerating — but it also damages the surrounding healthy tissue.