Author: admin
Servicing Medical Equipment Using Refurbished Replacement Parts
Are you wondering if it is safe to buy used linear accelerators? Thanks to the unrelenting spirit of radiation technology expert’s linear accelerators continue to maintain their place among the most sophisticated tools in the treatment of cancer. They produce and deliver radiation with the utmost precision and thus are one of the main equipment sources in our fight against cancer. In order to stay within a budget for medical equipment, medical facilities often consider refurbished equipment such as linear accelerators.
A refurbished linear accelerator does not mean that the machine is faulty or ineffective. In fact many times a refurbished linear accelerator is tested more thoroughly then new OEM equipment. A refurbished linear accelerator may have been used, parts replaced but still in pristine conditions. The machine might have been used in one of the largest institution and perhaps it has been sold because they have upgraded theirs or have proceeded with a new machine or option in treatment.
There are many reasons to invest in a refurbished linear accelerator. It allows you to meet the new challenges in treatment without maximizing the budget on a single piece of machinery. This is extremely helpful when opening a center, expanding a facility, bringing new treatments to your hospital, when budgeting is crucial.
Refurbished linear accelerators are pretty much essential so having a back up piece of equipment often pays off in a big way. When your main machinery fails your facility will not stall because you have furnished your facility with a spare refurbished linear accelerator.
When you are able to invest in more machinery your facility may be able to offer more and better treatment. The new refurbished equipment will allow your medical facility to turn into the go-to location for treatment therefore leading to expansion.
Refurbished medical equipment allows facilities to have peace of mind. Reliable equipment that has been tested relentlessly can live up to providing proper treatment to patients. When equipment needs to be maintained hiring a specialized medical equipment service company is important. Many times refurbished components can actually be used to maintain and repair equipment.
Outsourcing medical equipment repairs also saves companies money as they are not required to keep a technician on staff. A reliable repair team that is able to service your machinery as repairs and maintenance are needed remain a part of the crucial aspects of ensuring the prosperity of your facility and the positive results of treatment.
Learn more about Radparts and the variety of services and parts they offer to repair medical equipment including: linear accelerators parts, CT scanners parts, linac parts, and radiation oncology equipment at www.radparts.com. To contact one of our medical equipment repair specialists for parts or service call toll free 877.704.3838 for 24/7/365 support.
Finding Quality Medical Equipment Repair Specialists
As a student practicing medicine or someone who owns a medical clinic you know the costs you have to incur in order to get new equipment. If you keep your equipment regularly maintained it will last longer but that does not mean that there are no chances of things breaking down.
Fortunately, most of the medical equipment can be repaired using the services of technicians. Repairs ranging from oncology equipment replacement parts to Varian replacement parts can be made which means that you do not have to invest in new, expensive equipment. If you are looking to find specialists, this article will help you locate good technicians for your equipment.
Consult Fellow Doctors
As the owner of your clinic, there is a strong chance that you will have a lobby of people who will be experiencing the same routine you are experiencing as a doctor. Suppose you require oncology equipment replacement parts but are not sure where to look but you have a lobby of fellow doctors; you should look no further than them.
Ask around to see if any of them faced an issue with their equipment and you might get to know where they went for repairs. If you go for repairs and give the reference of their regular customer then there is a chance that you might get a discount too, which makes the task a lot more fruitful.
Search Online
These days, online forums are the best places to go if you need reviews about something or wish to know of some services which might be near you. These forums are quite efficient in letting you know where to go and what prices you can expect, so if you have no clue where to start your search from, online forums are your saviors.
In case your needed repairs are very technical like Varian replacement parts, which cannot be found everywhere, these forums prove to be even more effective. The technicians they can hook you up with will most of the times be very professional in their jobs, so the chances for your search to bear fruit will be plenty.
Look for Advertisements
Newspapers and online pamphlets are great ways for technicians to promote themselves and if you are looking for a technician who can provide you with material like oncology equipment replacement parts and can personally install it, there is no harm in contacting him/her through the means specified in the document.
This method has more of a risk associated with the costs involved and the quality of work, in the case of highly specific equipment like Varian replacement parts, because the person you are getting in touch with may not be as efficient as you want him/her to be, but that is where you can use the internet again to question about the service in forums. All in all, there is always a starting step when you are doing something for the first time, so you can only aim for reducing the risk involved, not eliminating it.
Learn more about Radparts and the variety of services and parts they offer to repair medical equipment including: linear accelerators parts, CT scanners parts, linac parts, and radiation oncology equipment at http://radparts.com/services.php. To contact one of our medical equipment repair specialists for parts or service call toll free 877.704.3838 for 24/7/365 support.
Henry Ford treats first patients with MRIdian Linac
ViewRay’s MRIdian Linac received FDA approval in February of this year. Now a team at Henry Ford Cancer Institute has become the first in the world to treat patients with this new MR-guided radiotherapy system.
Henry Ford received the MRIdian linac earlier this year, with ViewRay installing and validating the system from about February to June. Henry Ford began treating patients in July. So far, two cases involved intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) for prostate cancer, and one case involved stereotactic body radiotherapy (SBRT).
“Once the physicians got a chance to see what they could do with this treatment system, we immediately prepared for using SBRT,” explained Carri Glide-Hurst, director of translational research and senior staff physicist at Henry Ford Cancer Institute.
Carri Glide-Hurst and Anthony Doemer
Initial images
Speaking at the AAPM Annual Meeting in Denver last week, Glide-Hurst described the MRI characterizations performed during commissioning. For example, the team tested magnetic field homogeneity by imaging a 24 cm spherical phantom at the magnet isocentre at multiple gantry angles. Spectral peak analysis revealed that implementing a mean gradient approach improved the homogeneity of the field, with 80% of the data points falling within 5 ppm.
Spatial integrity, assessed using the ViewRay phantom, was less than 2 mm over a 35 cm diameter spherical field-of-view for 90% of the tested points, and less than 1 mm over a 20 cm sphere for all points. The team also developed a large in-house phantom with over 7000 landmarks. They observed that distortion increased moving further from the isocentre, as expected, but was still less than 2 mm at 20 cm away from the isocentre.
Glide-Hurst showed some images recorded from the first prostate patient. In just three minutes, the MRIdian Linac acquired a high-resolution (1.5 mm3) scan over a 45 × 30 × 36 cm field-of-view. The image was fused with the planning CT and used to guide couch shift before treatment. “What’s most exciting to me is the quality of the patient images,” she told the audience.
During treatment, the MRIdian Linac records tracking MR images at 4 frames/s, with a resolution of 3.5 × 3.5 × 7 mm. These images are used to gate the treatment, switching the beam off if the target moves outside of the treatment field. Glide-Hurst pointed out that the image quality is still excellent even while the beam is on. The team plans to incorporate fully adaptive radiotherapy into treatment plans in the near future, she added.
In this first patient, the total treatment delivery time including gantry rotation was 5.4 min. For the SBRT patient, the high-resolution (1.5 mm3) scan took 173 s, and the total treatment delivery time was about 6 min.
Also speaking at AAPM, Anthony Doemer, a senior staff physicist at Henry Ford Cancer Institute, described the commissioning of the MRIdian Linac’s multileaf collimator (MLC). He explained that the system incorporates a completely redesigned collimator: a double-stack MLC with two banks of 8 mm thick doubly focused leaves. This enables the system to generate field sizes from 0.2 × 0.4 cm up to 27.4 × 24.1 cm.
Doemer and colleagues first measured the MLC leakage. IEC specifications require this to be less than 1% over 1 cm with an average transmission of less than 0.375% compared to reference. “The maximum leakage was substantially lower than that, which is great,” said Doemer. They also tested MLC linearity using Sun Nuclear’s IC profiler and a picket fence test. “All measurements easily met TG-142 standards,” he noted.
Other tests included output factor measurements, and percentage depth dose and profile analysis. “We saw really great agreement between point measurements and Monte Carlo values,” said Doemer.
For SBRT, the Henry Ford team used data from previously treated patients (liver, pancreas and prostate) in their database of SBRT cases to evaluate that the system was correctly commissioned. Doemer noted that the system was able to achieve all dose constraints seen in these previous treatments.
“The Henry Ford and ViewRay teams were able to fully validate the beam characteristics of our new linac,” said Doemer. “This gave us a high level of confidence that we are able to treat patients.” The commissioning period was efficient (within four weeks) given the significant effort provided by the Henry Ford physics and ViewRay teams working together.
New indications
One big advantage of the MRIdian Linac is its ability to treat many indications that are difficult to visualize with X-ray-based image guidance. For example, they have now performed two simulations for accelerated partial breast irradiation (APBI). “The physicians are really excited about the potential of reducing APBI margins using MRI guidance,” said Glide-Hurst.
“APBI is another exciting area for us,” added Doemer. “The tracking ability makes it different from anything that we’ve done before.”
With two weeks of treatments now under their belt, the team is currently performing treatment planning for further cases. As well as the APBI simulations, they have now also simulated the first liver and retroperitoneal nodal treatments. “Because of the greatly enhanced MRI visualization, this technology opens significant opportunity for treating liver cancers,” Glide-Hurst told medicalphysicsweb.
Original Source: http://medicalphysicsweb.org/cws/article/research/69653
Original Date: Aug 8 2017
Original Author: Tami Freeman
Servicing Medical Equipment
Medical facilities want top notch equipment with the latest gadgets to assist their patients getting the best treatments and preventative care that they deserve. Having devices such as linear accelerators saves lives and purchasing them from a good company is fundamental. Getting devices which meet industry requirements help to ensure that clinical experts are able to operate them successfully and help them to get the information that they need.
Purchasing the right equipment for diagnosis and treatment requires clinical facilities to spend time and money looking. This machinery has a huge impact on the facility. Dependable devices save time and money. This is so true when it comes to linear accelerators and their use in the treatment of cancer.
The technology used in conventional linear accelerators is essentially the same for all linear accelerators. The high energy generation can be achieved either by implementing the “travelling waveguide technology” or by implementing the “standing waveguide technology”. The first approach is simple and reliable while the second features a more stable treatment beam. The generated radiation beam is flattened and shaped using collimation devices to form a beam matching the shape of the tumour.
The wave guide, the filters, and the collimator are mounted on a gantry which rotates around the patient allowing the tumours to be irradiated from multiple directions. There is a linear accelerators patient coach especially designed to allow irradiation of the patient from multiple direction. However choosing a device that is easy to service is important as well. Get something that many companies are capable of fix and keep in running order as this is extremely important.
Medical diagnostic device make sure that everything is running well and it’s important in ensuring that all equipment is working the way that it is meant to. Having functioning medical devices is one of the most essential matters that any medical facility can do as they provide many essential diagnostic tools to medical professionals.
Linear accelerator service techs are responsible for radiotherapy and associated medical equipment health care facilities all over. This includes supervision of installation, acceptance and responsibility for the maintenance and service of this equipment during its life cycle. The technicians consult with Physicists, Oncologists, Radiologists, Radiation Therapists, Medical Radiation Technologist and Management to determine levels of service and to mitigate downtime.
The tech is involved in equipment acquisition by offering advice on technical and service specifications. This is one of the main reasons that replacement parts for linear accelerators and other radiation oncology equipment are in high demand. When a piece of radiation equipment breaks down it is crucial to the treatment of patients that it is repaired quickly to avoid downtime in patient care.
There are several applications that linear accelerators offer throughout medical facilities including:
- Radiation Treatment For Cancerous Tumours
Linear accelerators are mainly known as the machine that is used in radiation therapy to target cancerous tumours. Linear accelerators accelerate electrons. When they are speeding up, that is when they would be getting the heavy metal target.
- LINAC Treatment
This treatment is similar to the laser technique which is used in a wide variety of cosmetic treatments. This ensures that the healthy cells and issues around the area where it is focused are not destroyed as well.
- MRI
Linear accelerators are also used in MRI tests. In this test, the scanning of the different body parts is conducted in order to find out whether there is any problem with these body parts.
Learn more about Radparts and the variety of services and parts they offer to repair medical equipment including: linear accelerators parts, CT scanners parts, linac parts, and radiation oncology equipment at http://radparts.com/services.php. To contact one of our medical equipment repair specialists for parts or service call toll free 877.704.3838 for 24/7/365 support.
Radparts Specials August 2017
Elekta MR-linac Consortium Brings Founding Members Together With Clinicians From Five New Centers to Highlight Progress
Elekta (EKTA-B.ST) announced today that five leading cancer research centers joined with the seven founding members of the Elekta MR-linac Consortium to share research and discuss clinical trial plans for Elekta’s MR-linac system. The 10th annual consortium meeting was held in Amsterdam at The Netherlands Cancer Institute. The consortium is a global research partnership established in 2012 to help bring MR/RT to the clinic and transform the use of radiation therapy in the treatment of cancer.
The founding members of the Elekta MR-linac Consortium are: University Medical Center Utrecht, the Netherlands (UMCU); The Netherlands Cancer Institute-Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Hospital, Amsterdam, the Netherlands; The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas; the Institute of Cancer Research, working with its clinical partner The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, London, England; Froedtert & the Medical College of Wisconsin Clinical Cancer Center at Froedtert Hospital, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; The Christie NHS Foundation Trust, Manchester, UK and the Odette Cancer Centre, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto.
Clinicians and scientists from the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, University Health Network, Toronto, Canada; Odense University Hospital, Denmark; Tübingen University Hospital, Germany; Uppsala University Hospital, Sweden; and William Beaumont Hospital, United States also participated in this year’s consortium meeting.
Elekta’s MR-linac is the only MR/RT system that integrates a high-field (1.5 Tesla) MR scanner, from MR technology partner Philips, with an advanced linear accelerator and intelligently-designed software. The system is expected to deliver precisely targeted radiation doses while simultaneously capturing highest-quality MR images, which will allow clinicians to visualize tumors and surrounding normal tissue at any time and adapt the treatment accordingly. Elekta introduced the MR-linac technology under the name of Elekta Unity during the ESTRO congress in Vienna, Austria in April 2017.
“The 10th Consortium meeting demonstrated the high collaborative capacity of our consortium across different disciplines and geographies,” said Kevin Brown, Elekta’s Global Vice President of Scientific Research. “We are gratified that the consortium continues to generate data that demonstrates the technical functionality and clinical utility of our MR-linac system and expect that the input from the additional sites will further expand the robust body of evidence supporting MR/RT as a transformative approach to radiation therapy.”
“The development of MR-linac has truly been a global effort, and the participation of clinicians and scientists from five additional cancer centers in this year’s meeting has underscored the value of including insights from a broad array of experts,” said Christopher Schultz, MD, FACR, Medical College of Wisconsin Professor and Chairman of the Department of Radiation Oncology, at the Froedtert & MCW Cancer Network and Chair of the Elekta MR-linac Consortium. “As MR-linac advances toward the clinic, we will continue to seek input from radiation oncologists, medical physicists and imaging experts around the world. We believe that this broad and inclusive approach is the most effective way to ensure that our vision for MR/RT meets the needs of patients, physicians, and cancer care centers.”
Key discussion points of the Consortium meeting were:
- Planning pre-clinical and clinical studies to establish the added value of MR/RT in specific tumor types and cancer indications. These include indications commonly treated with radiation therapy as well as cancer types for which radiation therapy is not typically used due to difficulties in discriminating between the tumor and surrounding soft tissue.
- UMCU highlighted its successful first-in-man treatments on Elekta’s MR-linac system and presented the accuracy results to the group.
- Updates from consortium centers on their volunteer imaging programs.
“MR-guided radiotherapy has the potential to transform the treatment of cancer by enabling more precise, adaptive tumor targeting, and we are excited about helping to bring this important advancement to patients,” said Michael Milosevic, MD, Director of Research, Radiation Medicine Program, Princess Margaret Cancer Centre and Vice-Chair (Research) Department of Radiation Oncology, University of Toronto. “The Consortium has been very effective at promoting collaborative innovation in MR-guided radiotherapy and we look forward to continuing to move this evolving area of radiation oncology and precision cancer medicine forward.”
“The MR-linac consortium together with the five new centers is an impressive novel network within the radiation oncology community,” said Daniel Zips, MD, Chair, Professor Radiation Oncology at Tübingen University Hospital. “Mastering the new technology towards innovation in radiation therapy requires joint efforts and combined expertise. The Tübingen group is happy to contribute to this endeavor which will bring radiation oncology to the next level.”
The growing body of evidence supporting Elekta’s MR-linac system as the first to truly enable MR/RT will be showcased at the 59thAmerican Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM) Annual Meeting & Exhibition (July 30 – August 3, Denver) and the upcoming 2017 ASTRO Annual Meeting (September 24-27, San Diego).
Original Source: http://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/Elekta-MR-linac-Consortium-Brings-Founding-Members-Together-With-Clinicians-From-Five-New-Centers-to-Highlight-Progress-1002230871
Original Date: Aug 3 2017
Original Author: PR Newswire
Elekta Aims for More Accurate Radiation Therapy with Unity
A Swedish company is staking its hopes for a larger North American market on a radiation therapy device that can more accurately target tumors than current technology, including real-time imaging.
Eighteen years in development, Elekta’s Unity combines two incompatible devices, a Philips 1.5-Tesla magnetic resonance imaging machine (MRI) with a largely metal linear accelerator, and a highly sensitive linear accelerator or Linac, to produce high-resolution, or high field, images of tumors during cancer treatment. The sharper image allows the radiation therapist to use smaller margins to target the tumor, sparing surrounding healthy tissue from harmful rays.
The MRI-Linac also allows the radiation therapist to detect whether a tumor has moved or changed, and to more accurately focus the beam during each treatment. Elekta’s Unity has demonstrated the dose of radiation within 1% and with 0.3mm accuracy, according to Jan Lagendijk, professor of clinical physics at University Medical Center, Utrecht, the Netherlands. Lagendijk developed the MRI-Linac with Bas Raaymakers, a professor of experimental clinical physics at the same institution.
The radiation oncology market is large, with about half of all cancer patients receiving some type of radiation therapy sometime during the course of their treatment, according to the National Cancer Institute.
Elekta is in the midst of a first-in-human trial at UMC Utrecht to measure the accuracy of Unity in five patients with spinal cord tumors. Radiation inaccurately directed at the spinal cord can cause paralysis, according to Kevin Brown, a physicist and vice president of Research and Innovation at Elekta.
“If you have cervical cancer, that’s moving around all day, quite dramatically,” Brown added. “With today’s technology, we have no way of dealing with that motion . . . This new technology is providing the next level of visualization of what you want to treat at the time you are treating it.”
This heightened precision might enable radiation oncologists to increase the dose at a particular visit and thus reduce the number of treatments, Brown added.
How did the researchers marry two highly incompatible technologies? It modified the MRI machine’s active shielding, introduced passive shielding, and redesigned the linear accelerator. The rest is proprietary information, Brown said.
“It was never possible to combine these two machines,” said Ina Jürgenliemk-Schulz, MD, a UMC Utrecht radiation oncologist and principal investigator of the study. “It was quite a milestone that they did it.”
Startup ViewRay (Oakwood Village, Ohio) patented a similar, but smaller MRI-Linac combo in 2011, a combined 6 MV Linac and 0.35-Tesla MRI machine it calls MRIdian Linac. That machine is considered low-field, but Brown said he’s glad that ViewRay paved the way with regulators. MRIdian Linac has already received CE Mark and 510(k) approval from FDA. Elekta expects to land the CE Mark for Unity by the end of 2017, followed by FDA approval. Elekta is one of the largest makers of radiation oncology devices and has the partnership with Philips on its side as well, Brown noted.
Kristofer Liljeberg, an analyst who follows Elekta for Carnegie, believes Unity could dominate this market segment in a few years.
“We believe the Unity MR Linac will be very important for Elekta to improve sales and order growth that has suffered in recent years,” Liljeberg wrote in an email. “Given the high interest from early adopters, Elekta should have a good chance [of] hitting the target of 75 orders until 2019.”
Original Source: http://www.mddionline.com/article/elekta-aims-more-accurate-radiation-therapy-unity-06-20-17
Original Author: Nancy Crotti
Original Date: June 20 2017
The Average Life Space of Linear Accelerator Parts
As linear accelerators age errors can creep in, but how long is the average lifespan of a medical linear accelerator given that the machines cost of millions of dollars? While it’s reasonable to expect a good 5 to 10 years of use out of a linear, accelerator maintenance also takes its toll on expenses. Most institutions can expect a single linac (Linear Accelerator) machine to cost somewhere in the range of 300,000 dollars every 2 to 3 years.
Facilities can often squeeze more use out of a machine and ensure errors are resolved by keeping the software up to date and replacing or upgrading linear accelerator parts when needed.
It is essential to choose a reputable company to replace your linac’s aging parts as the wrong equipment can end up harming the machine instead of improving it. Most companies who sell linear accelerators and parts will have service contracts available that offer varying levels of support.
Depending on the size of the facility they may be required to choose between keeping the software up to date, operator manuals, or having staff and physicists trained in the use of the accelerator.
You can reasonably expect a for-profit facility to experience some pressure when using this expensive piece of medical equipment. After all, they will need to treat enough patients over time to pay for it.
One of the biggest concerns for facilities using a linac machine is one of liability for injuries to patients. As a litigious society always goes after the institution which gives the best chance of a payout the facility is usually the one bearing the brunt of the lawsuits.
Their expensive insurance creates the illusion that they have large sums of money available for payouts, and this is why it is in the facilities best interests to reduce errors and improve patient confidence. The best way to do this is to ensure the linac gets serviced regularly, software is kept up to date, and all staff is adequately trained.
Learn more about Radparts and the variety of services and parts they offer to repair medical equipment including: linear accelerators parts, CT scanners parts, linac parts, and radiation oncology equipment at www.radparts.com. To contact one of our medical equipment repair specialists for parts or service call toll free 877.704.3838 for 24/7/365 support.
How we’re making radiotherapy a smarter, kinder treatment for cancer
Radiotherapy is a crucial part of treatment for many cancers. Here at the ICR, we’re developing new ways to use radiotherapy to kill cancer cells with fewer side effects and fewer hospital visits.
Given its 100-year history, you might be forgiven for thinking of radiotherapy as archaic, old-fashioned, out-of-date.
But you couldn’t be further from the truth.
More than 120,000 cancer patients in the UK are treated with radiotherapy each year and the technique continues to cure more people than all existing drugs combined.
Although the principle has remained the same through history – using radiation to damage DNA and kill cancer cells – the mode of delivery has become much more sophisticated over recent decades.
We founded our department of radiotherapy in the early 1940s and have been pioneers in developing the technology, at the forefront of some of the biggest developments that have improved patient care.
Our research into ways to target delivery of radiotherapy precisely to tumours has helped increase the effectiveness of radiation treatments, leading to changes in clinical practice, reduced treatment complications and improved cure rates.
Intensity modulated radiotherapy
Along with our hospital partner The Royal Marsden, we pioneered intensity modulated radiotherapy (IMRT). This high-precision method enables the X-ray beam used in radiotherapy to be adjusted, changing beam shape and intensity as the machine moves around the body, to match the shape of the tumour. This spares the surrounding tissue, and allows higher intensities of radiation to be concentrated on the tumour.
Our researchers have shown that this technique reduces the severity of side-effects in many cancers – such as Professor Kevin Harrington’s research into avoiding dry mouth in patients treated for head and neck cancers, or Professor David Dearnaley’s work to reduce bowel, bladder and sexual side-effects in prostate cancer patients.
We have also shown that the technique is suitable for elderly patients with bladder cancer.
Image-guided radiotherapy
Advances in the imaging of cancer using scanning techniques allowed the ICR and The Royal Marsden to extend the potential of IMRT by combining diagnostics and therapeutics in a new technique, known as image-guided radiotherapy (IGRT).
This allows the radiation beam to be adjusted based on feedback from a scanner that monitors patients in real time.
The technique can accommodate for movement of tumours in the body as a patient moves, protecting surrounding tissue even more effectively.
The MR Linac – a UK-first set to revolutionise radiotherapy
The ‘daddy’ of image-guided radiotherapy, the MR Linac, combines two technologies – an MRI scanner and a linear accelerator.
This means we will be able to precisely locate and dose even moving tumours – such those of the lung, affected by breathing, or a prostate tumour that might move from day-to-day depending on what the person has eaten and how full their bowel is.
The ICR and The Royal Marsden are the first in the UK to receive the multimillion pound machine, which is due to be up and running, and ready to treat patients in 2018.
Reducing side effects of breast cancer radiotherapy
Professor Judith Bliss, Director of the ICR’s Clinical Trials and Statistics Unit, and Professor John Yarnold led a study to reduce side effects from radiotherapy for breast cancer.
The IMPORT LOW trial, involving more than 2,000 women, demonstrated that postoperative radiotherapy focused only around the part of the breast that had contained the tumour has fewer long-term side effects and is just as effective as standard whole-breast radiotherapy.
The researchers hope the study will contribute to a change in clinical practice in the very near future.
Less is more for early breast cancers
Our work hasn’t just focused on precision targeting. We’ve also been looking at refining the doses of radiotherapy needed to kill cancer cells.
The START clinical trial, led by Professors Judith Bliss and John Yarnold, found that three weeks of radiotherapy is as good as five weeks for treating breast cancer – as well as being more convenient and less tiring for patients.
It has also had the added benefit of being cheaper for the health service, saving the NHS around £50 million per year since 2009.
Better for patients, better for the NHS
Professor David Dearnaley led a practice-changing clinical trial that found a shorter course of prostate cancer radiotherapy, involving 17 fewer hospital visits and higher individual doses of radiotherapy, is as effective as the current standard treatment for both survival and quality of life – and could save the NHS tens of millions of pounds per year.
Could gut bacteria dictate how people respond to radiotherapy?
Our researchers have begun the first study to look scientifically at the influence of gut bacteria on how people with cancer respond to radiation treatment.
Professor David Dearnaley and colleagues hope to shed light on whether some patients with a particular make-up of gut bacteria respond differently to radiotherapy, which in turn could affect the amount of radiotherapy they are offered.
The ultimate aims of this work are to reduce the severity of bowel problems after pelvic radiotherapy, and to find out if changing the make-up of the gut flora in individual patients will benefit patients.
Using radiotherapy in combination
Professor Kevin Harrington and his team have been working on combining radiotherapies with chemotherapy, targeted therapies, and even immunotherapies and viral therapies to compliment and boost their cancer-killing abilities.
Many of these combinations have been successful in the lab, and may soon be brought into clinical trial.
Support our work to refine radiotherapy
We are a charitable organisation and rely on support from donors and supporters, as well as grants from major funding organisations.
Find out more about our work to develop kinder, smarter radiotherapy treatments and how you can help us to continue to improve cancer patients’ lives.
Original Source: http://www.icr.ac.uk/blogs/science-talk-the-icr-blog/page-details/how-we-re-making-radiotherapy-a-smarter-kinder-treatment-for-cancer
Original Author: Dr Claire Hastings
Original Date: 11 July, 2017