In countries with the best cancer outcomes, approximately 60% of patients receive radiotherapy as part of their treatment, which is one of the most cost-effective cancer treatments. Notably, around 40% of cancer cures include the use of radiotherapy, either as a single modality or combined with other treatments. Radiotherapy can provide enormous benefit to patients with cancer. In the past decade, significant technical advances, such as image-guided radiotherapy, intensity-modulated radiotherapy, stereotactic radiotherapy, and proton therapy enable higher doses of radiotherapy to be delivered to the tumour with significantly lower doses to normal surrounding tissues. Progress is also being made in the combination of new cancer drugs with radiotherapy to improve the efficacy of cancer treatment. In this talk, I will discuss the gap that currently exists between advancing technical radiotherapy skills in the clinic and our rapidly evolving knowledge of cancer biology. I will propose strategies to bridge the gap, in order to optimise radiotherapy treatments for future cancer patients.
Professor Ricky Sharma is Chair of Radiation Oncology at University College London and a Scientific Group Leader at the UCL Cancer Institute. He is also an Honorary Consultant in Clinical Oncology at University College London Hospitals and the Royal Free Hospital, where he has a clinical practice in radiotherapy and chemotherapy. He graduated in medicine from the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. He trained in general internal medicine, medical oncology and radiation oncology and completed a PhD on DNA damage repair. Ricky Sharma is an international authority on the translation of radiobiology from the laboratory to the clinic and on the multi-modality treatment of cancer with precision radiotherapy.