Disruptive technologies for proton/ion oncology workshop.

Thursday 28 Apr 2022, 10:00 → 18:05 Europe/London

RAL

Bob Bingham (STFC), Ken Long (Imperial Coll.)

The present incidence of 17 million new cases per year globally predicted to increase to 27.5 million new cases per year by 2040. Radiotherapy (RT) is effective in cancer patients and is already involved in cancer cures. To increase the rate of diagnosis of cancer in the early, curative, stage implies an increasing need for therapeutic interventions including RT.

The use of novel beams with strikingly different characteristics has led to exciting evidence of enhanced therapeutic benefit, eg., therapy using very high dose per fraction, very high dose rate (> 40 Gy/s, "FLASH"), and “mini-beam” (MBRT). This evidence, together with developments in our understanding of personalised medicine based on the biology of individual tumours, now provides the impetus for a radical transformation of ion beam therapy (IBT).

While incremental development of cyclotron-, synchrotron-, and linac-based solutions are being pursued to enhance clinical capability, laser-driven proton and ion sources are disruptive technologies that offer enormous potential to satisfy the anticipated growth in demand for IBT by providing more flexible, compact and cost-effective high energy particle sources.

In this workshop we will discuss the state of the art in the provision of IBT and various approaches by which to deliver the step change in capability required to meet the projected growth in demand.

Hybrid Event

ZOOM recording for the morning session (1F=mX=1f)

ZOOM recording of the afternoon session (%xe5bT4a)

10:00 → 10:30 Registration: Tea & Coffee

Tea and coffee in R22 coffee lounge

10:30 → 12:30 Session 1: Clinical need; pre-clinical and biological research

Convener: Ken Long (Imperial Coll.)

10:30 Karen Kirkby (University of Manchester)

Lessons learned in building a research capability for proton therapy; informing the design of the ITRF

11:00 Katia Parodi (LMU)

Advanced on-site imaging in modern radiation therapy: challenges and opportunities

11:30 Jason Parsons (University of Liverpool)

Radiobiology research examining the impact of protons versus photons in tumour cell models

12:00 Kristoffer Petersson (OIRO)

FLASH, current status and potential for proton/ion oncology

12:30 → 14:00 Lunch Break

14:00 → 15:00 RAL Lecture: RAL Lecture by Amato Giacca and Ken Long

15:00 → 15:29 Coffee & Tea

15:30 → 17:35 Session 2: New and transformational approaches

Convener: Bob Bingham (STFC)

15:30 Ulrich Schramm (HZDR)

16:00 Nick Dover (IC/JAI)

Development of laser ion sources toward applications in oncology

16:30 Hywel Owen (ASTeC/DL)

A preliminary activity to prepare for a UK Ion Therapy Research facility

17:00 Kevin Prise (QUB)

Pushing the dose-rate envelope with laser-based radiobiology

17:35 → 18:05 Closing Discussion