5th PPRIG workshop held at NPL in Teddington
The Proton Physics Research and Implementation Group (PPRIG) welcomed participants for the 5th PPRIG workshop at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Teddington.
The group aims to exchange the latest developments in proton therapy in the UK, establish a programme of work that drives research forward and results in collaborative research funding. The annual workshop is the main meeting to provide a platform to achieve these goals. During the two days, talks about the status of the operating proton therapy centres in the UK were given, latest detector technologies and developments in proton radiobiology were presented. International leading experts gave their insights on the treatment of cancer with protons and the future projections. QUASAR Roland Schnuerer gave a presentation about the developments of the LHCb VELO detector as an online beam monitor for medical accelerators, recently published in the journal Instrument. He is looking forward to testing the setup in the 40 MeV proton beam at the University of Birmingham next month.
Furthermore, QUASAR member Jacinta Yap presented her results and ongoing progress with the simulation modelling of the Clatterbridge Cancer Centre eye proton therapy beamline in the poster session. Both contributions sparked fruitful discussions and interesting questions. An interesting presentation was also given on complex DNA damage by high LET protons and related cell work by Dr Katie Nickson, a member of Dr. Jason Parson’s collaborating radiobiology group from the North West Cancer Centre.
The workshop provided an excellent overview on the current status of proton therapy research in the UK and from the discussions and research presented, proved beneficial to attendees and their own work.