Speaker
Description
About 130 years ago, the first cancer patient was treated with X-rays that had just been discovered by Wilhelm Röntgen. Although that treatment did have a pronounced effect on the gastric tumour of the patient, overall the treatment was not very successful and the patient died 20 days later. From that initial experience until now, the discipline of radiation biology investigated mechanisms and processes responsible for biological responses to radiation that enabled evolution of radiotherapy into a treatment that plays an important role in approximately 50% of all cancer patients at some stage of the management of their disease.
In this lecture the fundamentals of biological responses to radiation, and how these support current radiotherapy practices will be discussed.