Protons and cancer therapy

Curative cancer treatment requires radiotherapy (RT) in almost 2/3rd of all cases. Unfortunately, children are highly susceptible to the development of debilitating toxicities and secondary malignancies from RT. Normal tissue sparing with hadron-beam therapy is being actively investigated to reduce RT side-effects. The objective of this talk is to describe conventional and novel normal tissue-sparing applications of photon and proton beam therapy, respectively; radiobiological interplay with the tumor microenvironment will also be discussed.