Recent Advances in Particle Therapy for Cancers

Dear Colleagues,

Particle therapy was first used at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory more than 50 years ago. After that program closed, particle therapy moved to Japan in 1994 and later Germany in 2002. Currently, there are 13 operational facilities, with a few more under construction.

In this Special Issue, we will focus on three key aspects of particle therapy:

1. Physics and technology: recent advancements in technology, including but not limited to accelerators, imaging, detectors, and computational capabilities, and the advancements they have led to in particle therapy;
2. Radiation biology: the radiobiological advantage of particle therapy, which comes from its high LET and leads to direct and clustered DNA damage and a large relative biological effectiveness (RBE). In addition, specific biological mechanisms that make particle therapy especially suitable for tumors that are radiation-resistant and/or hypoxic and which mean that it has great potential for inducing therapeutic immune responses;
3. Clinical outcomes: knowledge stemming from the approximately 50,000 patients who have been treated with CIRT in the past three decades, as well as the Phase I/II trials that have been carried out in Japan and Europe over the years and which show negligible toxicity while simultaneously showing great tumor control for a wide variety of treatment sites, including but not limited to bone and soft tissue sarcomas, adenocarcinoma, and malignant melanoma. 

Dr. Chris J. Beltran
Dr. Keith Furutani
Guest Editors

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