ESTRO 2010, 12-16 September, Barcelona

Professor Jean Bourhis – Institute Gustave Roussy, Paris, France

Update from the President of ESTRO

At eleven o’clock this morning you’re speaking about the vision for ESTRO and then the next talk is the vision from ECCO, from Professor Baumann who was the President of ESTRO. What’s the vision in your eyes?

ESTRO, you may know, started thirty years ago and really in developing there were two pillars – education and dissemination of science through conferences and the Journal for Radiation Oncology. Those two pillars have been very successful; in terms of education it's really a growing process where we now have more than thirty courses worldwide and the quality is also improving in these courses. We are adding new tools – electronic e-learning, e-controlling and so on. So the vision there for education is to maintain the super quality that we have and to expand in a reasonable way.

Now if we look at the other pillar, which is conference, dissemination of the up-to-date research and science, we have conferences like this one, which is central to the society, it’s the annual meeting but also we are creating the portfolio in two different ways. We have specific conferences that are still dealing with radiation oncology, specific aspects, and we are also very interested and we are pushing more in having a multi-disciplinary approach and being integrated and being a strong partner at multi-disciplinary conferences.

So that’s what we’ve done in prostate cancers, in lung cancer, in imaging cancer, in head and neck cancer and more are coming. So this is part of our strategy, really, to be a strong partner in this multi-disciplinary setting. And also to be a stronger partner in ECCO because we always have our biannual ESTRO meeting in ECCO and now we will make sure that our meeting is fully engaged on these ECCO years.

And that’s in Stockholm next year?

It’s in Stockholm and afterwards in Amsterdam.

But you’re having a special 30th birthday party in London to celebrate ESTRO’s 30th; tell me about that.

Yes, we have an anniversary special event which will be in London. It will gather events that anyway were scheduled during this year - the brachytherapy meeting, the physics meeting. So they will be at the same place in London and we will also have a special anniversary track with international radiation oncology societies, also with ESMO, ASCO and other societies. Plus some special events like a specific retreat for our teachers, because we have a lot of teachers, more than 200 in ESTRO for the teaching courses. We will also have the inauguration of our foundation, the ESTRO Cancer Foundation, and that will be inaugurated during the anniversary.

Why London?

Why London? That’s a good question. It’s a little bit symbolic because the very first meeting of ESTRO took place in London thirty years ago, so we come back.

And who was the President then? Who was the first President of ESTRO?

I think it was Peckham, Michael Peckham.

Sir Michael Peckham.
Sir Michael Peckham.

And he actually was the first editor, or one of the editors, of the European Journal of Cancer too. So even then he was multi-disciplinary, wasn’t he?

Yes. ESTRO was very multi-disciplinary in his hands when it was created.

As you know, I used to be involved in funding a lot of radiation research in the UK. My view from outside is that the UK is still very strong in radiobiology research, but so is the rest of Europe. My feeling is that the European strength in research, applied to radiation medicine, is stronger in Europe than it is in America.

It may be the case, yes. If you see at this meeting, for instance, we have quite a number of presentations on radiobiology applied to radiotherapy, so this is certainly an important aspect.

And you have some controversy topics here?

Yes, we have debates.

What are the hot ones you’re going to go to?

Maybe the use of chemotherapy in head and neck cancer, I think that’s quite an interesting topic.

Are you for or against?

It depends.

Thank you very much indeed Professor Bourhis, I really appreciate it.