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Other London events

Tracking tumours: cancer in our sights

Past event - 2015
20 May Doors open 6.30pm
Event 7pm-9pm
The Somers Town Coffee House, 60 Chalton Street,
London NW1 1HS
Radiotherapy helps cure over 40% of patients with cancer. What most people don’t know is that the key to effective radiotherapy is getting an accurate image and model of the ever moving, ever changing cancer. Learn how physics and medicine combine to create one of our most important tools for fighting cancer.

Tracking Tumours: Nothing stays the same: How anatomical changes influence radiotherapy

Martin Menten
Radiotherapy typically takes several weeks. During this time the patient's anatomy may change: breathing or bowel motion causes the tumour to shift and deform in just seconds, the patient's position on the treatment couch differs from day to day, and the tumour can shrink or grow over the course of weeks. These changes can compromise the effectiveness of treatment. This talk will discuss how our research aims at adapting different aspects of the radiotherapy to compensate for anatomical changes.

Tracking Tumours: Would you rather?

Dr Sarah Gulliford
Modern radiotherapy can be precisely targeted at tumours, but it’s inevitable that there will be some exposure of surrounding tissues to radiation. And those doses can lead to unwanted effects. Would you rather suffer from flatulence or erectile dysfunction? Luckily, using data from clinical trials can help us to understand how different healthy tissues respond to radiation. Using this information allows us to give higher doses to tumours while minimising the long-term risk of side-effects.

Tracking Tumours: How listening to tumours helps guide cancer therapy

Dr Emma Harris
Using ultrasound, Emma spends her days shooting sound waves into the body and listening to the echoes. Ultrasound measures how the body and the cancer are responding to treatment. And her work uses it to solve a key puzzle, how to make a finely tuned radiotherapy beam accurately hit cancer cells in an ever-moving and deforming tumour. We use ultrasound to image the human body and help us guide therapy - and can develop smarter therapy that changes according to the signals we can listen to.
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