by
Sean Ruck, Contributing Editor | September 06, 2019
From the September 2019 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
HCB News: Are there any recent developments in the field you’re particularly excited about?
TD: There are actually quite a number. One of the most important advances over the last six or seven years is the role of immuno-oncology. It’s been clear by several publications that the combination of radiation therapy with some of the so-called checkpoint inhibitors — the immuno-oncology drugs — is more beneficial than the drug alone. Melanoma, for example, is a disease where this has been seen. Moreover, I think it’s extremely exciting, we are beginning to understand the molecular underpinnings of how the radiation-checkpoint inhibitor interaction is occurring. We are now coming to a place where we can start to think about screening patients to determine who would most benefit from a particular approach.
Another development is molecularly targeted radiation. This involves tiny molecules that target cancer cells and have a radioisotope linked to them. These small radiolabeled molecules are injected into a patient's bloodstream and circulate in the blood, binding to the cancer cells and delivering radiation right to the cancer. Prostate cancer is one of the places this is being developed.
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There’s also the notion that radiation oncology is performed in what is termed, “closed loop medicine”. That is to say, you see patients, do all the tests, design a plan, test the plan before you deliver to the patient, the patient comes, and you reevaluate right before you give it to them, and then you treat them. That’s repeated every day. So our field generates a tremendous amount of data that can be mined with deep-learning algorithms and other artificial intelligence models. These models will to help us learn who might need more or less radiation, based on certain features seen in thousands of patients before them that we mine from these huge data repositories.
HCB News: What are you most excited about seeing or experiencing at this year’s conference?
TD: There is a whole new learning style we’re putting forward for the meeting — the presidential course in particular. It’s meant to be much more interactive. We are starting with a topic that is somewhat controversial: radiation therapy in the curative treatment of metastatic disease. Our goal is to really engage the audience in the topic with several “level setting” talks with the goal of getting all of the audience on the same page as to the state-of-the-state of metastatic cancer. This will be followed by an Oxford-style debate between experts, which we will use as a platform for much smaller breakout sessions where the various aspects of that topic can continue to be discussed and debated. It’s more interactive between audience participants and the lecturers and educators. We are excited to bring this new format to ASTRO this year and really hope it is a more enjoyable and engaging way to educate our members.
