CT’s second proton cancer treatment center to begin construction this summer in Danbury for $96M

News-Times – Monday, March 31, 2025
By Rob Ryser

DANBURY – A $96 million cancer treatment center using novel proton technology to reduce damage to healthy tissue could begin construction on the city’s west side as soon as summer.

“We have an entrepreneurial team working very ambitiously to get our details together so we can move forward,” said Drew Crandall, a spokesman for a physician group called Danbury Proton that earned Connecticut’s approval in January to operate what would be the state’s second proton therapy center. “Our team has been going full speed forward, but there is a lot of work to do behind the scenes.”

A proton therapy center in Wallingford under a partnership between Hartford HealthCare and Yale New Haven Health broke ground in the summer with an opening planned for the end of 2026. That would make the Wallingford facility the only proton therapy center between New York and Boston.

The Danbury proton center would open in 2027 to serve Fairfield County and nearby New York, according to the current plan.

“I have been through the plant where they make this equipment in Boston – and talk about advance manufacturing,” Crandall said. “They take the protons out of the nuclei of hydrogen atoms and accelerate them into a beam.”

Unlike traditional radiation, a proton beam can be set to stop once it hits the tumor, thereby avoiding damage to tissue behind it. That makes the therapy especially useful for cancer near the brain and the spine.

The 14,000-square-foot Danbury Proton facility, planned for a 3-acre site on Wooster Heights Road overlooking Danbury Municipal Airport, received local land use approvals in 2021. At that time, the project was expected to cost $80 million.

But the project had trouble getting permission from a state oversight agency.

In 2022, Danbury Proton was denied by Connecticut’s Office of Health Strategy because the physician group had not established “a clear public need for proton beam therapy,” or that it would be affordable.

Danbury Proton appealed and was denied a second time.
In 2023, Danbury Proton filed a new application, hoping for better results.

Meanwhile, the same health strategy office approved the proton center in Wallingford.

Among the conditions Danbury Proton agreed to with the state agency in January are that the center will “become credentialed as a Medicaid provider” and it will “commit at least 5% of net revenue to providing care for the uninsured and/or covering patients’ out-of-pockets.”

Danbury Proton expects to create 100 jobs during construction and employ “32 full-time equivalent employees, including radiation oncologists, medical physicists, radiation therapists, medical support and administrative staff.”

“It is a pretty long construction process because it’s high tech, so we are on a two-year journey,” Crandall said.

The proton center represents the latest commercial investment in the city’s west side that continues to lead Danbury in economic growth.

A $39 million rehabilitation hospital with 40 beds is expected to open in September in a sprawling hilltop community called the Reserve.

Two other residential projects at the Reserve totaling 177 homes are under construction or have been approved, along with 360 apartments that have been completed or are under construction at the 1.3-million-square-foot mixed-use campus known as the Summit.

Also on the west side, a developer is seeking final approval to convert a defunct hotel into 200 micro-apartments at Interstate 84’s Exit 2.

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