The effectiveness of heavy-ion radiotherapy for cancer treatment has been recognized by medical experts and the public. However, due to the large size of the equipment, this therapy has not been widely adopted. In particular, the rotating gantries used to irradiate patients with the heavy- ion beams from any direction may be as heavy as 600 tons in our estimation. By employing high-temperature superconducting (HTS) wires in these rotating gantries and increasing the magnetic field generated by the deflecting coils, the total weight of the rotating gantry can be reduced to around the weight of those used for proton radiotherapy. A project for developing an HTS deflecting magnet for heavy- ion radiotherapy has been underway since 2013, supported by the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) and the Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development (AMED). The aim of this project is to develop fundamental technologies for designing and fabricating HTS deflecting magnets, such as irregular magnetic field estimating techniques, design technology for HTS magnets, high-precision HTS coil winding technology, AC loss estimating techniques, and thermal runaway estimating techniques and to fabricate a small model of an HTS deflecting magnet and evaluate its performance. In this paper, the project's progress will be described. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.