“Not through discounts. Through design”: how ARISTION plans to cut proton therapy costs by up to 22 per cent
By Arunima Rajan
Israeli medical technology company P-Cure Ltd and Indian healthcare company ARISTION Proton Center Private Limited announced the signing of a binding agreement to deploy P-Cure's compact, synchrotron-based proton therapy systems in India. ARISTION plans a long-term investment of approximately ₹1,900 crore to build dedicated proton therapy infrastructure across the country.
The first centre will be established at Sentient Health City, Bengaluru, ARISTION's flagship 660-bed quaternary campus built around integrated artificial intelligence and augmented care solutions, followed by centres in Kochi and a third major metropolitan city. Together, the three centres form the initial phase of a wider national proton therapy network. For the Kochi centre, ARISTION is actively seeking a joint venture partner, while evaluation of locations and partners for the third proton centre is underway.
The companies describe the agreement as far more than an equipment installation. It is a long-term, deeply integrated partnership that combines P-Cure's proton therapy technology with ARISTION's clinical and operational leadership, with a single stated aim: to bring proton & ion precision treatment within the physical, geographic, and financial reach of ordinary Indian families.
Across the network, care will be built on an integrated AI and augmented intelligence layer, with Surgy.health, a new-age AI operational layer for hospitals, as the AI technology partner for the ARISTION group, spanning hospital operations, clinical workflows, and patient experience.
Conventional proton therapy facilities typically demand vast infrastructure footprints and heavy capital expenditure, costs that are ultimately passed on to patients. P-Cure's ultracompact, synchrotron-based system is engineered around a dramatically smaller footprint and materially lower operating costs, with no compromise on clinical capability.
In an interview with Arunima Rajan, Dr Lohith G Reddy, Chairman & Managing Director,
ARISTION Proton Center Private Limited, talks about how ARISTION will “take the cost out of steel and concrete, and pass the saving to the family”, why the team is “comfortable saying no to our own machine”, and why “the clinical protocol writes the business plan”.
Take us back to the decision to build ARISTION. What were you seeing in your practice that convinced you India needed a different model?
Most of us meet a hospital on our worst day. You walk in scared, holding a folder of reports, hoping somebody will really listen. I spent years on the other side of that desk, and somewhere along the way a question started following me home. What if a hospital knew you on your good days too? What if care began long before illness, and didn't end when you walked out?
For most of my career, that was a wish, not a plan. No doctor, however devoted, can watch over thousands of lives at once. But technology now can. That's what changed everything. AI and augmented intelligence made a new kind of hospital possible, one that holds your baseline, notices the smallest drift away from it, and brings it to a doctor while the options are still wide open. The moment the question met the technology, ARISTION grew out of it. Care built around the whole person, for the whole of their life, with intelligence doing the watching and doctors doing the deciding.
So that's what a sentient health city is. Sixteen institutes on one campus. Full multispeciality medicine, mother and child care, genomics, and prevention running as a proper clinical department with its own consultants. At the centre sits proton therapy, the one instrument precise enough to build everything else around, in a country that today has just two operational proton facilities for 1.4 billion people.
And then there's the part that excites me most as a scientist. Telomera Longevium XII, our longevity research institute, with a regenerative medicine lab right inside the campus. The idea is simple. Cancer is biology's most demanding teacher. Every tumour we study shows us how human cells age, make mistakes, repair themselves, renew. Telomera is the research layer that sits above the hospital and listens. What we learn treating disease flows, under strict ethical governance, into the study of healthy ageing itself. And we'll publish what we find. We believe it's a first for India inside a hospital setting.
Why Bengaluru first? I could give you the strategic answer, and it's true. Talent, technology, flights to everywhere. But the honest answer is simpler. Bengaluru is where I was born. You build the first one where your heart is. Then you take it to the whole country.
What would a family actually pay for a complete course of treatment, and how much do you expect insurance to cover?
Let me be straight with you. I'm not going to announce a price I can't yet honour. Exact packages will come once our regulatory clearances are in place.
But I will say this on record. We've engineered the model so that a complete course of proton therapy at ARISTION costs roughly 20 to 22 per cent less than what it costs in India today. Not through discounts. Through design. A compact system, a leased campus instead of capital buried in land, operations run on technology. Take the cost out of steel and concrete, and pass the saving to the family.
On insurance, there's good news that many families don't know. Several proton treatments are already covered by Indian insurers today, when they're medically indicated. And as the evidence grows and more indications enter the guidelines, more coverage will follow. We're working with insurers and government payers now, well before we open, so that a family knows exactly what's covered before treatment begins.
A smaller machine can make a centre cheaper to build. But what does it take to make treatment cheaper for the patient?
Fair question, because a cheaper building doesn't automatically mean a cheaper bill.
Three things make traditional proton therapy expensive. The machine. The enormous building around its rotating gantry, which is nearly the size of a football field. And thirty years of financing on both, which every patient quietly repays inside their bill. Our compact, upright system goes after all three. The vault is a fraction of the size. There are no hundreds of tonnes of rotating steel. So the capital cost sitting behind every single treatment falls sharply.
Now, what we will never cut. The physicists, the oncologists, the quality checks, the AERB compliance. That's the difference between a beam and a cure, and I'd rather the machine stand idle than compromise there. Our answer on that side is scale and intelligence. Surgy.health runs our operations, and a network across multiple cities spreads the cost of expertise over many more patients. Put simply, be ruthless about concrete, be uncompromising about people.
As a radiation oncologist, how do you decide when proton therapy justifies its cost, and how does that decision stay independent of business pressure?
Every proton centre in the world should have to answer this publicly, so I'm glad you asked.
Proton isn't better radiation for everyone. It's decisively better for specific patients, and the science is quite clear about who. Children, first and always, because sparing a developing brain, spine or heart changes an entire lifetime. Tumours at the base of the skull and along the spine, chordomas and chondrosarcomas sitting millimetres from the brainstem. Complex brain tumours. Eye tumours. And re-irradiation, where the surrounding tissue has already taken all it can. Then there are indications where the evidence is growing well. Head and neck cancers, where saving the salivary glands and swallowing muscles means a patient can eat dinner with their family again. Left-sided breast cancer, where the heart sits in harm's way. Oesophagus and lung. Selected prostate, liver, and lymphoma in young patients.
As for keeping it honest, three things. Every patient goes through a multidisciplinary tumour board, anchored to international guidelines, before any treatment is chosen. Patients who are better served by conventional radiotherapy are referred to partner institutions. We're comfortable saying no to our own machine. And we'll publish our indication mix every year, so anyone can check that our decisions follow the evidence.
I was a clinician long before I was an entrepreneur. The day a business plan starts writing prescriptions, the institution has failed. I built ARISTION so the opposite is true. The clinical protocol writes the business plan.
The ₹1,900 crore investment signals substantial ambition. How much is committed today, and what needs to happen before the first patient is treated in Bengaluru?
Our founding equity round is fully closed. The rest is milestone-based debt and phased equity, drawn down against progress. Capital follows construction here; it doesn't sit idle. And the lease model keeps our money where it belongs, in medicine and people, not locked into land.
Four gates stand between today and the first patient, and I'll name them plainly. The multispeciality hospital opens first, in late 2027, because a proton centre should sit inside complete medicine, never as a standalone machine. Then the regulator. AERB reviews and accepts our vault design, and I want to say this clearly: our system doesn't even ship until they do. Safety gates our schedule. Never the other way around. Then installation, beam commissioning, and independent physics validation.
And finally our people, who are being recruited and trained right now. If all four gates open as planned, the first proton patient is treated in Bengaluru in early 2028.
How will someone living far from these centres find their way into the network, afford the stay and receive follow-up care closer to home?
It starts with a single lifelong record that can begin from anywhere in India. The scans, the genomics, the treatment plan, all of that travels over the wire. The person travels only once, for the beam itself. On campus, family accommodation is core infrastructure, planned with the same seriousness as the vault, because for an outstation family the real burden is lodging, food and lost wages, not just the treatment. And when treatment ends, the hospital goes home with them. Follow-up and recovery continue through their own local doctor, who sees exactly what our board sees. A hospital treats you when you arrive. A sentient system stays with you after you leave.
The doors open outward too. India already treats families from Africa and the Middle East, and more and more from Europe and the West, at about a third of what the same quality of care costs in Western countries. Bengaluru is the natural gateway. It's connected by air to the world, and it's India's Silicon Valley, which matters, because a health city with AI and augmented intelligence at its core belongs in the city that writes the world's software. But accessibility means both journeys to me. The family from a district in Karnataka and the family flying in from Nairobi or Dubai or London walk through the same door, into the same record and the same standards.
Walk us through one specific part of a patient's care where AI will make a measurable difference, and who takes responsibility when it gets something wrong?
Our intelligence layer runs on Surgy.health, and everything it does answers to six principles. Prevention, proactive, personalised, precision, predictive, proton.
Let me give you the least glamorous example on purpose, because it's where AI genuinely earns its keep. A tumour is not a statue. Over weeks of treatment it shrinks, the patient loses weight, the anatomy shifts by millimetres. With protons, millimetres are everything, because the beam stops exactly where you tell it to. Re-planning a treatment used to take days of a physicist's time, which meant patients around the world were often treated on plans that were a week stale. Intelligence compresses that into hours. The plan delivered today matches the patient as they are today. And the benefit isn't a slogan; it's measured in radiation dose spared to the healthy brain, heart or salivary gland, on every plan, and it can be audited.
Who's responsible? A doctor. Always, and without a footnote. The system prepares, a doctor decides and signs their name to it, in that order, every time. Every recommendation is traceable to its source, its version and who reviewed it. We built this to give clinicians superhuman attention to detail. The accountability stays thoroughly human. A named clinician on every decision, and an institution answerable for all of them. And I lead that institution as a doctor first.
Walk us through one specific part of a patient's care where AI will make a measurable difference, and who takes responsibility when it gets something wrong?
The honest evidence will be simple. More families, from more of India, getting world-class care they could actually reach and afford. And outcomes we publish, not just claim.
Beyond that, we'll keep examining ourselves with the same honesty we ask of our data. If the numbers show we aren't reaching far enough, geographically or economically, we'll rework our pricing and outreach until we do. If the evidence for any treatment evolves, our protocols evolve with it, because the patient's interest is the only fixed point in this institution. That, in the end, is what sentient health means. A system built to sense, to learn and to improve. And that learning starts with us. Hold us to all six principles.
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