Rutherford Cancer Centre, Newport

brainstrust spent an afternoon at the Rutherford Cancer Centre in Newport, South Wales yesterday. This is the first of a network of centres to open which provides all encompassing care and also includes Proton Beam as one of the therapies offered. Other centres are opening in Northumberland, Liverpool and Reading. Rutherford collaborate with a range of partners, including the NHS, to provide people with the best life outcomes possible. We’ll be rolling out a series of workshops at each of these centres over the next year so that you can find out more.

New innovations too are in the news this week, both of which could limit the harmful side effects of radiotherapy and help to preserve brain function, such a memory. Dynamic Couch Rotation, which synchronises the position of patients with the rotation of the radiotherapy beam, has shown to be effective in five patients. Researchers calculated the new technique was as accurate as advanced radiotherapy, called Volumetric Modulated Arc Therapy (VMAT). Harmful or debilitating side effects could limit the benefit of radiotherapy treatment for patients with brain cancer, but the new technique can deliver effective doses of radiation while reducing exposure to sensitive brain tissue nearby, compared with VMAT. Read more about this here https://www.icr.ac.uk/news-archive/new-radiotherapy-system-that-moves-patients-in-sync-with-x-ray-beam-can-deliver-accurate-treatment-for-brain-cancer

Researchers from the University of California, Irvine and the University of Lausanne in Switzerland have discovered how an experimental technology called FLASH radiotherapy dramatically reduces the adverse cognitive side effects unleashed by traditional radiation treatments. Unlike current radiotherapy treatments, which target tumours with low-dose ionizing radiation for several minutes per session, FLASH employs a much higher dose of radiation but only for milliseconds. Overall, the patients received the same amount of radiation, but FLASH delivered it in a much shorter time frame:
Radiotherapy has often been considered the ‘orphan’ of cancer treatments but it often has better outcomes than other therapies. You can find out more about the different types of radiotherapy and Proton Bream Therapy on our resource page:
And of course, any questions just pick up the phone or email!