Conference Synopsis

Program Description
The University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health is organizing a 3-day conference, September 13 – 15, 2009, on “Theragnostic Approach to Personalized Multimodality Cancer Care.”

Radiation therapy is unique among the cancer treatment modalities because it can be modulated in the four dimensions of time and space. Modulation in the time domain is the time-dose-fractionation problem and this continues to be one of the most fruitful avenues for further improvement of the therapeutic ratio in radiation oncology. Spatial modulation has been greatly facilitated by recent technological advances in treatment planning and delivery such as the introduction of IMRT, IGRT and particle beam therapy. Progress in functional and molecular imaging together with an improved understanding of the patterns of spread of cancer provide the tools that will allow us to prescribe 4D radiation therapy that is optimized in the individual patient. All of these developments combined with progress in biological and chemical targeting of cancer cells provide not only challenging and exciting research opportunities but also a real hope that more cancer patients will be cured.

The invited national and international faculty and the host faculty will present an update of the current status of multi-modality targeted cancer therapy. New research opportunities will be identified and the relevance of each of the above topics to clinical practice in Radiation Oncology will be emphasized.

Scope of Practice & Intended Audience
This activity has been designed to meet the needs of radiation oncologists, medical oncologists, radiobiologists, medical physicists, therapists, biological modelers, dosimetrists, and other health care professionals interested in radiation oncology.

Elements of Competence
This activity has been designed to address medical knowledge, patient care, and systems-based practice three of the six competencies of the American Board of Medical Specialties.