This Convergence-consortium combines socio-economic, technical, and bio-medical scientists to realize the Radiation Therapy Center 2030 for Personalized Self-Steering Radiotherapy. ‘A convergence approach is crucial to achieving genuine breakthroughs in cancer treatment with radiation.’

More than fifty per cent of all cancer patients receive radiotherapy, often combined with other therapies. Cancer survivors are increasing. And with that, the impact of long-term side effects of radiotherapy on patients and society. While innovations have decreased side effects and new combination therapies have improved outcomes, implementation and further development of radiotherapy innovations are still hampered by challenges in accessibility, capacity planning and financing.

Great promise lies in cross-disciplinary, highly personalized cancer treatment. However, considering patient heterogeneity, optimally using the growing data and combination-treatment options for each patient, and adapting radiotherapy during each session, prove extremely challenging.

2030

The Radiation Therapy Center 2030 combines a research program with a ‘Living Lab’ for fast-track innovation, value optimization, and clinical validation. A data repository will provide access to real-life clinical, imaging and tissue derived data from patients treated with photon or proton radiotherapy. For the latter, the clinical and preclinical research facilities of the Holland Proton Therapy Center will be used to unravel and exploit the biological differences of proton irradiation versus photon irradiation. The researchers will develop image guidance solutions to improve precision and AI-driven solutions for fast radiation-dose adaptation (self-steering), multi-criteria decision support and biomarker assays. A continuous broad health technology assessment is common practice for all developed solutions.

Convergence approach

‘A convergence approach is crucial to achieving genuine breakthroughs in cancer treatment with radiation that are affordable and accessible.’ Says Collaboration The Collaboration will set up a first framework, which allows a competitive position for future research that includes clinical intervention studies demonstrating the impact of further personalization.