A hospital scanner can now track a tumour’s chemical activity while simultaneously guiding a radiation beam to hit it, even as the patient breathes. This matters because cancer treatment today relies on a patchwork of imaging tools—CT, MRI, ultrasound, PET—that rarely work together in real time. A tumour can shift position during treatment, and current methods struggle to adapt. The Joint Department of Physics is developing ways to combine these imaging techniques so that doctors can define a target not just by its shape, but by its metabolic function, and then adjust therapy on the fly as organs move. If this succeeds, cancer therapy could become more precise and less damaging to healthy tissue. Patients might receive fewer side effects from radiation or ultrasound treatments, and more tumours could be treated that are currently considered too risky because of their location near moving organs. The work also tackles a hidden bottleneck: training and retaining researchers who understand both imaging physics and clinical application. Without that specialist workforce, promising lab discoveries never reach clinical trials. Platform funding keeps those people in place and funds the pilot studies that translate a bench-top idea into a patient-ready procedure.
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Many of the key opportunities that currently exist for improving the diagnosis and treatment of cancer are cross-disciplinary. Imaging now crucially underpins all therapeutic procedures. The Joint Department of Physics has developed and implemented methods for accurately delivering different radiation therapies to tumours using CT, Magnetic Resonance (MR) and/or ultrasound (US) imaging, but the use of emerging molecular imaging techniques (such as Positron Emission Tomography (PET), functional MR, US and optoacoustic imaging) will give us the opportunity to define targets according to biochemical or metabolic function. A major challenge in therapeutics is organ motion: here, for example, we are developing methods for pre-treatment modelling using MR, real-time US and intelligent x-ray tracking to guide radio- and US therapy. There are significant challenges in developing cross-disciplinary projects. These include training and retention of staff with the key combination of skills in imaging physics, therapy and clinical application, and the development of specialist multi-modality equipment, molecular imaging probes and histological techniques to support pilot studies. For example, satisfying the needs of both x-ray imaging and MR compatibility, can be challenging. A particular challenge in this sector is the translation of laboratory research to a stage where it may be tested in clinical trials. We are uniquely placed for addressing these. Platform funding will help us to retain researchers with the highly specialist key skills, to fund the pilot work for multi-modality applications and to allow translation of research results to a stage where they are ready for exploitation either in our clinics or by collaboration with industry.
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