A team at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, and The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust have used a new radiotherapy technique to deliver a highly concentrated dose of radiation to a moving target. In the future, the technique – called motion-compensated volumetric modulated arc therapy – could be used in lung cancer patients.
Effective delivery of radiation is a particular challenge in lung cancer, because tumours move around within the chest as patients breathe.
The researchers applied a mathematical equation – which predicted the effect of breathing on the movement of tumours – to radiation treatment plans for five previously treated lung cancer patients from The Royal Marsden. The researchers were able to follow the predicted paths of the tumours with a beam of radiation, adapting the direction of the beam through three-dimensional space. The researchers used a new device called the Agility, which is manufactured by a company called Elekta.
The research is published in Institute of Physics journal Physics in Medicine and Biology and was funded by The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) and Cancer Research UK.
Radiation therapy uses high-energy x-rays to kill cancer cells. Although it is very effective against cancer cells, it can cause collateral damage to other tissues in the body, and side-effects include tiredness, hair loss, fertility loss and, in some cases, secondary cancers. It’s very important to deliver as little radiation as possible to normal tissue during treatment, while at the same time giving enough to kill cancer cells.
Study leader Dr Gavin Poludniowski, former Post-Doctoral Training Fellow at the ICR – who recently took up a new post as Research Fellow at the University of Surrey – said:
“Advances in the world of physics are giving us hope of developing better tests and treatments for cancer patients. We were very excited to be able to test this latest device, which is one of the most advanced of its type in the world.
“We were pleased to show that tumour tracking could be a possible future option in radiotherapy for lung cancer, but we have a long way to go before this sort of treatment is introduced into clinical use. The next step needs to be to find a way to track tumours in real time, rather than predicting where tumours will move using calculations made before the treatment starts.”
Lung cancer kills by far the most people in the UK of any single cancer,claiming around 35,000 lives each year. It is also one of the most treatment-resistant cancers. More than two thirds of patients will die within just a year of diagnosis, and fewer than one in ten patients is still alive five years after diagnosis.
New treatments are urgently needed for lung cancer. We recently announced the launch of the Lung Cancer Alliance, a collaboration between leading research institutions and hospitals across London to transform the care of those suffering from lung cancer.