At the 2022 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, Rachel Jimenez, MD, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, examines updates and advancements in radiotherapy technology for patients with breast cancer.

Dr Jimenez discussed new technologies such as proton therapy and flash radiotherapy, in addition to new ways to utilize existing technologies, with the aim of reducing patient toxicity from breast cancer radiation.

Transcript

Hi, I‘m Dr. Rachel Jimenez. I'm an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and a radiation oncologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. I'm here at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium 2022, and I'll be delivering an educational session later this week about advances in technology in the delivery of breast radiotherapy. We think that there are some exciting advances in breast radiotherapy, both in utilizing technologies that have existed before, but utilizing them in different ways, and in thinking about new technologies that we have never employed before in the use of breast radiotherapy in the treatment of patients with breast cancer. I'll be talking a little bit about some of those advances. In particular, we'll be talking about ways to reduce toxicity from breast radiotherapy, ways that we can better spare the heart and lungs from radiation, as well as ways that we can reduce the imposition of treatment, so for example, getting rid of tattoos for patients who require breast radiotherapy.

We'll also be talking about some newer technologies, things like proton therapy that have the promise to try to spare normal tissue better than regular radiation. I'll also be talking about things that are much more novel and up and coming in the field of radiation, such as flash radiotherapy, which has the ability potentially to increase the amount of radiation we can deliver to patients, while also reducing the late-effects of radiation to normal tissue. We think this is an exciting time to be thinking about ways in which we can improve the therapeutic ratio for our patients.

Source:

Jimenez R. “Overview of the current state of the art - what patients and oncologists need to know.” Presented at San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium; December 6-10, 2022; San Antonio, Texas.