Proton Therapy Congress 2016
Proton accelerators for cancer therapy
Dr Stephen Myers - AVO, Geneva, Switzerland
The subject of my talk is what I try to do is look at the accelerators being used presently for proton therapy. Then each different type of accelerator has an inherent set of parameters or what it can do and then I look at those and see if it’s matched to what you want to do with proton therapy. Then I show which ones are better at which functions and hopefully I can show that probably the linac is the best solution.
.
Could you tell us about the proton accelerator for paediatric tumours?
First of all in 1996 at CERN we designed an accelerator specifically for proton therapy but that was twenty years ago. Twenty years later we started looking at another new specific design using the new technologies developed and we came up with this new novel accelerator called the LIGHT linac developed by a small Geneva company called ADAM. ADAM has been taken over by AVO and AVO is presenting here. So the idea there was to design something specifically for proton therapy, make it as cheap as possible and make it as widely available as possible and to fit everything, not everything but almost everything, which you need to do efficient proton therapy. That includes cost, clinical efficiency, size, all the rest.
How do you see cancer treatment adjusting to this new technology?
I’m not a medical person, I’m an accelerator person so what I want to do is build the accelerator as cheaply and efficiently as possible. It’s up to the medical people to find the best uses for those accelerators and I think they’re making huge steps in that direction.
How do you see these collaborative efforts moving the field forwards?
That’s extremely important because we need to know what they want and what they need and we need to react to that so therefore it’s very important that a dialogue takes place. That’s why, as I said earlier on, that these collaborations are extremely important where you get people from the various fields. While I was at CERN I set up what was called an International Strategy Committee and this had 25 of the top medical people in the world who met twice a year and advised us on what we should do. I think that’s the way to go.
What are your thoughts on the conference?
It’s been incredibly interesting. I think the subjects which have been tackled have been very, very interesting and very well presented. I think these conferences will continue to go on because there are still some unanswered questions and there’s still a lot of dialogue needed between the various people. We’ve talked about various things this morning like proton tomography which I think could be very interesting for the future; those people come over and visit us next week in Geneva and that’s the way, it starts at a conference and then it goes on and builds up.
