Euro Oncology Summit

Biography

Biography: Timothy Antaya

Abstract

The next frontier for Proton Beam Radiotherapy (PT) is to move away from large, expensive, and costly regional and national treatment centers that are hard to justify, to truely local, low cost systems with small footprint, advanced fast high precision scanned beam treatment methods, reduced need for custom patient treatment appliances, and significantly lower ownership costs, to enable this treatment modality… anywhere on the planet. We have to do this primaily for humane reasons- people requiring such cancer tretments have families, jobs and other responsibitities, and really need to be treated near their homes.  We have to do this for equality- if you believe a treatment has beneficial characteristics, and for PT that would be lower normal tissue morbidity and lower total treatment dose, then everyone should have access to it. And we have to do this for medicine- more long baseline studies of PT versus IMRT are needed to clearly establish the efficasy of PT, and that mean more systems put in the hands of leading researcher to do those comparison studies. With these principles always in mind, we have been in the vanguard of this movement now for nearly 2 decades, and are already partially or wholely responsible for many of the current generation compact systems being used for PT, or that are about to be used for PT.  These developments have been hard earned, requiring advances in beam physics,  engineering of all types, instrumentation and controls, and serial advances in all of the associated technolgies. But we are not done, and we think that we finally have the right single room PT solution, on parity with X-ray Radiotherapy in footprint, cost and complexity, for which we plan to present the scientific and technical basis of, for critical review, to oncologists, in this talk, at this meeting.

Keywords: Proton beam Radiotherapy