Conventionally, external beam cancer radiotherapy is delivered using photons, but proton therapy is experiencing rapidly growing interest. This is because protons exhibit the Bragg peak - highly localized dose deposition near the proton end-of-range - which allows the radiation dose delivered to the patient to be reduced considerably. TRIUMF - Canada's national particle accelerator centre - is the only Canadian facility which has experience in delivering proton therapy to patients. Until 2019, TRIUMF regularly treated patients with ocular melanoma, but the program has since been halted, leaving Canada as the only G7 country without a single proton therapy centre. Instead, Canadian patients have to be referred to the US for proton treatment. Even so, TRIUMF continues to leverage its extensive network of national and international collaborators, its proton therapy expertise, and its former clinical treatment room to continue to advance proton therapy research. This includes a focus on proton therapy's potential to reduce radiation-induced lymphocyte killing, which is correlated with adverse clinical outcomes like lower overall survival. TRIUMF also performs extensive modeling of treatment outcomes and cost-benefit analyses of various potential future proton therapy landscapes in Canada. The goal of such studies is to quantify the long-term cost of patient referrals to the US, compare them to the cost of constructing national proton therapy facilities, and determine the optimal location of such centres. This presentation will provide the audience with an overview of proton therapy and TRIUMF's historic and future role in advancing it.
Sebastian Tattenberg received his PhD from the University of Munich in Germany, having performed the accompanying PhD research at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in the US. After postdoctoral positions at TRIUMF in Vancouver and the French national research agency (CNRS) in Lyon, Dr. Tattenberg returned to TRIUMF as a tenure-track associate research scientist. Dr. Tattenberg's research focuses on proton radiotherapy for cancer and the associated sparing of the patient's immune system and improvements in quality-of-life. He has authored dozens of peer-reviewed articles in highly respected scientific journals, has given a series of invited lectures, and is currently heading four review articles related to different aspects of his research. In addition, Dr. Tattenberg serves as an Associated Editor to the journal Medical Physics and is currently in the process of becoming an Associate Editor at the Journal of Clinical Medical Physics. He is one of the co-chairs of the Early Career Researcher (ECR) Subcommittee of the Particle Therapy Co-Operative Group (PTCOG) and the lead of its Initiatives and Webinars working groups.