In an official ceremony presided over by the President of the Plurinational State of Bolivia, Luis Arce Catacora, the Nuclear Medicine and Radiotherapy Center, developed by INVAP, was inaugurated today in the city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra.
The event was attended by the Minister of Hydrocarbons and Energy, Franklin Molina Ortiz; the Minister of Health and Sports, Jeyson Ausa; the main authority of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Rogelio Mayta Mayta; and the General Executive Director of the Bolivian Atomic Energy Agency (ABEN, in Spanish), Hortensia Jiménez Rivera; among other Bolivian authorities.
The Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation, Daniel Filmus; the President of the Argentine National Commission of Atomic Energy (CNEA, in Spanish), Adriana Serquis; and from INVAP, its Deputy General Manager, Carlos Montenegro; and the Manager of Technological Integration Services, Engineer Juan Carlos Rodríguez; as well as representatives of the Argentine Embassy in Bolivia were present on behalf of our country.
This inauguration is part of the agreement between ABEN and INVAP, signed in February 2018, which includes the complete design of three centers; their construction, equipment and start-up; the training of human resources, local professionals’ advice to start the centers’ activity and remote support and consultancy services for their sustainable management.
The first center, located in the city of El Alto, was inaugurated early this year and is expected to be fully operational in 2023.
With this project, health care capacity will be provided to the community by means of imaging for the early diagnosis of oncological, cardiac, and neurological diseases; and radiotherapy and chemotherapy will be provided for the treatment of cancer, as well as chemotherapy.
The center in Santa Cruz, like its predecessor in El Alto, is equipped with two linear accelerators, a complete brachytherapy room, a simulator tomograph, a dosimetry laboratory, nuclear medicine equipment using PET/CT and SPECT/CT for diagnosis and a chemotherapy area.
This new center, located in the country’s most populous city, is a School Center for the training of nuclear medicine professionals in Bolivia and it is part of the network of Nuclear Medicine and Radiotherapy Centers planned for a total investment of 150.7 million dollars for the three centers.
