Speaker
Prof.
Manjit Dosanjh
(CERN)
Description
Cancer is a major societal problem and it is the main cause of death between the ages
of 45 to 65 years. In the treatment of cancer, radiotherapy (RT) plays an essential
role.
RT with ions, due to their unique physical and radiobiological properties, offers
several advantages over photons. In particular, they penetrate the patient with
minimal diffusion, they deposit their maximum energy at the end of their range, and
they can be shaped as narrow focused and scanned pencil beams of variable penetration
depth.
Hadron beams allow highly conformal treatment (where the beam conforms to the shape
of the tumour) of deep-seated tumours with great accuracy, while delivering minimal
doses to surrounding tissues. RT with ions thus has great prospects for being used
in early stages of tumour disease not amenable to surgery. It is likely that, besides
its more impressive effect on radio- resistant tumours, post-treatment morbidity will
be lower in patients treated with ions due to the lower dose and toxicity to normal
tissues.
Visionary physicist and founder of Fermilab Robert Wilson first proposed the use of
hadrons for cancer treatment in 1946. This idea was first put into practise at the
Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL) where 30 patients were treated with protons from
1954–1957. Since then the total number of patients treated with hadrons in the World
now exceeds 48000 and almost 5000 new patients were treated last year.
Several dedicated hospital-based centres with significant capacity for treating
patients are now taking the place of the first R&D facilities hosted by the physics
research laboratories (e.g. LBL, GSI). Europe is playing a key role in the
development of light ion therapy facilities with five financed centres using actively
scanned carbon ions (of which two are under construction in Heidelberg and Pavia) and
several proton therapy centers which will become operational soon. In the US two
proton therapy centers are running and four more are under construction. In the
Far-East, in particular Japan but also Korea, and China are investing in
hospital-based hadrontherapy centres.
The European Network for Research in Light-Ion Hadron Therapy (ENLIGHT) was
established in 2002 to co-ordinate European efforts in radiation therapy using
light-ion beams. ENLIGHT has been instrumental in bringing together different
European centres to promote hadron therapy, in particular with carbon ions. ENLIGHT
created a multidisciplinary platform, uniting traditionally separate communities so
that clinicians, physicists, biologists and engineers with experience in ions.
The success of the network has encouraged the scientific community to promote more
inclusive collaboration between the researchers and regional activities and to
enlarge the collaboration to include the proton community. Hence ENLIGHT++ continues
the vision started by ENLIGHT.
Author
Prof.
Manjit Dosanjh
(CERN)
