ENLIGHT meeting 2018
From 25th to 27th of June, the annual ENLIGHT Meeting and Training took place at the OMA beneficiary institution University College London (UCL). ENLIGHT is an acronym for European Network for Light Ion Hadron Therapy. The network has been established at CERN in order to coordinate the European efforts in hadron therapy. Two OMA fellows, Jacinta Yap (University of Liverpool) and Laurent Kelleter (UCL) had the opportunity to participate in the 16th annual ENLIGHT meeting since its foundation in 2002.
Jacinta contributed to the conference with a poster on the simulation of the Clatterbridge Cancer Centre (CCC) beam line, which has been developed in collaboration with Simon Jolly and Mathieu Hentz from UCL as well as Royal Holloway, University of London and CCC. Laurent presented a poster and gave a talk about the development of a scintillator-based range telescope for quality assurance in proton therapy.
The first day of the meeting was dedicated to hands-on training on proton therapy. It included talks on the clinical and physics potential of proton therapy, quality assurance in clinical trials and the public perception of proton therapy in the UK, to name just a few. The day was rounded up by a demonstration of the Eclipse treatment planning system by Varian.
The second day focused on dosimetry, imaging and patient selection. Clinicians and scientists from multiple proton and ion centres across Europe and the USA reported about their experience and practise. After a long day of interesting talks and lively discussions, the conference participants enjoyed a boat cruise on the river Thames through the British capital.
On the final meeting day, there were sessions on combined radio- and immunotherapy, the differences of treatment with different light ions and paediatrics.
The whole meeting was live-blogged on Twitter where details on the talks can be found under the hash tag #ENLIGHT2018 or by following the PART group @ProtonAdvancedRT. The full program can be looked up under https://indico.cern.ch/event/659363/. The next year’s meeting will be hosted by the then brand new proton therapy facility of Caen, France.