Proton Therapy Congress 2016
Increasing confidence in proton therapy delivery
Prof Gary Royle – University College London, London, UK
At University College London, it’s the largest of the London universities, we have a big focus on cancer research and hundreds of researchers across UCL are focussed on this topic. With all cancer research the main focus is to improve survival rates of the cancer patients and to improve the quality of life of those patients survive. So at UCL and its associated teaching hospital, UCL Hospital, we approach it from many different angles. We look at the technology, the physics, the biology, the medicine, all different aspects and all to come out with this same end point that how can we get the patients living longer and with a better quality of life post-treatment.
How do you see proton therapy progressing?
At UCL Hospital we will have a proton centre in 2019, so approximately three years from now we will be treating our first patient. We are one of the NHS centres, so one of the two NHS centres in the UK. This has been a project we have been running for seven or eight years now to get this up and running and once it opens our aim is to deliver the best quality of care that we can for the selected patients on the NHS. In order to get there we have many research challenges that we want to approach. Key ones for us is things that have been discussed at this conference. Which patients should be prioritised for proton therapy compared to other forms of cancer therapy? In prioritising those patients how do you optimise the quality of treatment that you can actually deliver? A key issue for us is the problem of any radiotherapy treatment - you can’t really see where the tumour is at the time of delivery, and you can’t see the beam so you’re mapping the two together based on a prediction not on a current reality. A big focus of ours is image guidance, so how can we steer the proton beam to actually target the tumour site that needs the radiation dose while sparing the dose to the surrounding healthy tissue.
What are your thoughts on combination therapy?
It’s essential. We certainly need to do the studies, there such little information out there. Protons has been around as a clinical technique since the early ‘90s but only a small percentage of cancer patients have been treated with this way so there is just insufficient evidence to say that we must do it this way or we must do it in combination with this particular drug. At UCL we have a big focus on immunotherapy as a future treatment modality. It’s still early days, it’s looking very good in early phase studies, or pre-clinical studies, huge amount of potential, and it’s something that we strongly wish to push forward. In combination with radiotherapy and proton therapy I can see a huge future and it’s something that ourselves plus many other academic centres around the world are focussing on in terms of radioimmunotherapy.
