Clinical and Experimental Radiobiology

February 13 -17, 2012
Princess Margaret Hospital, Toronto, ON
View the lecture schedule.

Course Organizers

Dr. Anthony Brade holds the positions of clinician scientist and assistant professor in the Department of Radiation Oncology at University of Toronto and is a staff physician in the Radiation Medicine Program at Princess Margaret Hospital with a clinical focus on thoracic and gastrointestinal malignancies. He received his medical training at McGill University in Montreal. He has completed a residency in radiation oncology, a PhD in the department of Medical Biophysics and fellowship training in the Drug Development Program, Department of Medical Oncology, at the University of Toronto. He currently serves as Vice-Chair of the PMH Research Ethics Board. Dr. Brade’s research interest focuses on combined modality therapy, particularly the evaluation of molecularly targeted therapies and radiation treatment in the early phase clinical setting.

Dr. Brade will be lecturing on:

• Combined radiotherapy and chemotherapy
• Biological response modifiers in tumors – clinical implementation

View faculty profile for Dr. Brade

Dr. Barbara-Ann Millar

View faculty profile for Dr. Millar

Dr. Bradly G. Wouters is currently Senior Scientist and Director of the Hypoxia and Microenvironment Program at Ontario Cancer Institute in Toronto and a full professor in the Departments of Radiation Oncology and Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto. He is cross appointed as an Associate Chair of Graduate Studies and Director of Radiation Biology within the Department of Radiation Oncology as well as Senior Investigator in the Selective Therapy Program at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research. He is an expert in the field of molecular radiation oncology with a primary interest in understanding the cellular and molecular responses to hypoxia and their influence on the biological behavior of tumors. He has been a faculty member on the European Society for Radiotherapy and Oncology (ESTRO) teaching course on Basic Clinical Radiobiology in Europe for the past 10 years and was also the director of the ESTRO Molecular Oncology for the Radiation Oncologist course for more than 5 years. He has contributed as an author to several of the chapters in the Basic Clinical Radiobiology textbook used in Europe and many other parts of the world. Dr. Wouters is the recipient of several prestigious awards and honors. Most recently he was named the recipient of the ESTRO Klaas Breur Award – Annual Gold Medal Award Lecture for 2011. Other notable awards include the Michael Fry Radiation Research Award in 2009 from the Radiation Research Society and the Senior Investigator Award with the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research.

Dr. Wouters will be lecturing on:

• Molecular basis of cell death
• Hypoxia and the tumor microenvironment

View faculty profile for Dr. Wouters

Course Faculty

Dr. Soren Bentzen is a Professor of Human Oncology, Also professor of Medical Physics and of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, USA. He received a M.Sc. in physics and mathematics (1981), a Ph.D. in medical imaging (1986), and a D.Sc. in clinical radiobiology (1994), all from Aarhus University, Denmark. He is member of the Imaging and Radiation Science program of the Carbone Comprehensive Cancer Center in Madison. He has published more than 340 papers and book chapters, and has presented more than 280 invited lectures. He currently serves on 9 international cancer journal editorial boards. His research has been recognized by 23 awards and honors, including the ESTRO Breuer Gold Medal (2003), the MD Anderson Distinguished Alumnus Award (2008), the Douglas Lea lecture (2011) and Honorary Life Memberships of the Association of Radiation Oncologists of India (2008) and the Belgian Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology (2009). He held an Honorary Professorship at University College London (2000-2005); he is currently the Varian Visiting Professor to the Radiation Therapy Oncology Group (RTOG) and an Adjunct Professor of Radiobiology and Medical Physics, University of Copenhagen. His appointments include MD Anderson Cancer Center (1987-1988), Danish Cancer Society/Aarhus University (1988-1997), Gray Laboratory/Mount Vernon Hospital, London (1998-2004), and UW School of Medicine and Public Health (2005-present). His main research interests include late effects of radiotherapy; clinical radiobiology; integration of data from genomics, proteomics, and molecular imaging into novel radiation-therapy strategies; bioeffect modeling; biomathematics; and evidence-based medicine. He was elected to the International Commission on Radiation Units (ICRU) in 2010.

Dr. Bentzen will be lecturing on:

• Dose response relationships in radiotherapy – TCP, NTCP, therapeutic ratio
• The LQ-model in practice – examples of calculations
• Modified fractionation schedules (and limits)

View faculty profile for Dr. Bentzen

[top]

Dr. Robert Bristow is a Clinician-Scientist and Professor within the Departments of Radiation Oncology and Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto. He is a Senior Scientist at the Ontario Cancer Institute and a Radiation Oncologist in Genito-Urinary Oncology at the Princess Margaret Hospital (University Health Network). He received his MD and PhD from the University of Toronto (1992; 1997) and completed his RCPSC Board exam in Radiation Oncology in 1996. He completed post-graduate training at the UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, Massachusetts General Hospital–Harvard and Erasmus University, Rotterdam.

His current research focuses on personalized medicine approaches to prostate cancer treatment. His basic research interests include pathways of DNA damage response and repair, tumour hypoxia as relates to radiation oncology and the genomics of prostate cancer.

Dr Bristow is currently Co-Director of the STTARR Innovation Imaging Facility at the University of Toronto (MaRS Complex) and Head of the PMH-Campbell Family Research Institute Prostate Cancer Research Program. He co-leads the Terry Fox Foundation Project Program Hypoxia Team Grant at the Princess Margaret Hospital. He is Lead for the Canadian BRCA1/2 Prostate Cancer Network and the Canadian Prostate Cancer Genome Sequencing Project (CPC-GENE). The latter is an International Cancer Genome Consortium project for which Dr Bristow serves on the International Steering Committee.

As an educator, Dr Bristow has directly supervised more than 50 basic science undergraduate, graduate and post-doctoral trainees and 25 clinical residents or post-graduate fellows. In 2009, he was awarded the Post-Graduate Medical Education  Excellence Award in Teaching in the Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto. He has over 200 published papers, abstracts and book chapters and has been an Invited Speaker or Visiting Professor on more than 100 occasions.

He was made a Canadian Cancer Society Career Research Scientist in 2004, an honorary Fellow of the European Society of Therapeutic Radiation Oncology in 2011 and is twice an awardee of the Canadian Foundation of Innovation (CFI).

Dr. Bristow will be lecturing on:

• Intro to Radiobiology in the Clinic
• Radiation Induced DNA Repair and DNA Damage Response
• Patient Predictive Biomarkers and Individualization

View faculty profile for Dr. Bristow

[top]

Dr. Laura Dawson

Laura Dawson, MD, FRCPC received her MD and completed her radiation oncology residency training at the University of Toronto. She then completed a fellowship in high precision radiation therapy in gastrointestinal malignancies and head and neck cancer, at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where she stayed on as a faculty member until 2003, when she returned to Canada. She is presently a Full Professor in the Department of Radiation Oncology, University of Toronto. She leads the hepatobiliary cancer radiation therapy program at Princess Margaret Hospital, and is the principal investigator of several trials of stereotactic body radiotherapy (SBRT), including an international randomized trial of sorafenib versus sorafenib and SBRT in locally advanced hepatocellular carcinoma.

Dr. Dawson is an internationally recognized leader in high precision liver radiotherapy. Dr. Dawson has published over 100 scientific papers, and several seminal editorials and book chapters. She is a member of numerous international committees including the NIH Hepatobiliary taskforce. She has been a speaker at many international oncology meetings, and she has received numerous grants and honors related to her research in radiation therapy for liver cancer.

Dr. Dawson will be lecturing on:

• Stereotactic and high dose radiotherapy

View faculty profile for Dr. Dawson

[top]

Dr. Richard P. Hill obtained his B.A. in Physics at St John’s College, Oxford and his PhD in Radiation Biology at St Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical College in London, UK under the direction of Professor Joseph Rotblat and Dr Patricia Lindop. He is currently a member of the senior scientific staff of Ontario Cancer Institute/Princess Margaret Hospital (OCI/PMH), which is part of the University Health Network (UHN) in Toronto, Canada.  He is also a Professor in the Departments of Medical Biophysics and Radiation Oncology at the University of Toronto.

Dr Hill’s research program focuses on laboratory and translational research studies in tumour and normal tissue radiobiology, metastasis, cancer stem cells and aspects of the tumour microenvironment, notably tumour hypoxia. From 1991-2009, he acted as the PI on Terry Fox program project grants, that brought together both clinical and scientific colleagues to study the various topics mentioned above, particularly the role of tumour hypoxia in treatment outcome and tumour progression.

He has published over 200 scientific papers and has trained many post-doctoral fellows and graduate students. In 2008, Dr Hill was awarded the Robert L. Noble award by the Canadian Cancer Society for Excellence in Cancer Research, in 2009, he was the Failla Award Lecturer of the Radiation Research Society and, in 2011, he received the HS Kaplan Distinguished Scientist Award from the International Association of Radiation Research.  He is the co-editor (with Drs Ian Tannock, Rob Bristow and Lea Harrington) of the “Basic Science of Oncology”; a book that is widely used in basic courses for oncology trainees and is currently in its fourth edition. His research is currently funded by the Terry Fox Foundation, the Canadian Cancer Society Research Institute and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

Dr. Hill will be lecturing on:

• LET and RBE
• Tumour growth, stem cells and response to irradiation

View faculty profile for Dr. Hill

[top]

Dr. Dave Hodgson

Dr. Hodgson is an Associate Professor and clinician scientist in the Department of Radiation Oncology, and the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation, University of Toronto. He holds a Cancer Care Ontario Research Chair in Health Services Research, and is a staff radiation oncologist at the Princess Margaret Hospital, Toronto. He is the vice-Chair of the Children’s Oncology Group Hodgkin Lymphoma Committee, and a member of the COG Cardiac Late Effects Task Force, and the Haematology Disease Site Group of Cancer Care Ontario. His research activities include the utilization of population-based health administrative data to evaluate the treatment and outcome of cancer patients, particularly late effects. Recent work has included population-based evaluations of “new agents” funded through CCO’s New Drug Funding Program including rituximab and oxaliplatin, as well as new radiation therapy technologies including sterotactic radiosurgery (SRS) and intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT).

Dr. Hodgson will be lecturing on:

• Radiation-induced malignancies

View faculty profile for Dr. Hodgson

[top]

Dr. Michael Joiner is Head of Radiobiology at the Department of Radiation Oncology and Karmanos Cancer Institute, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan. He is an internationally recognised radiobiologist who has spent more than 30 years investigating how clinical radiotherapy can be made more effective using both manipulations of the radiation delivery schedule and also by the addition of chemical or physical modifiers of effect. He is an expert in quantifying radiation effects, the underlying medical physics of radiation delivery and the application of high-LET radiotherapy. He discovered low-dose hyper-radiosensitivity and the inverse very low dose-rate effect, both processes are major factors determining the extent of DNA repair following X-ray exposure and can determine the response of cells to radiotherapy.

Before he joined Wayne State University in 2001, Dr. Joiner spent 22 years at the Gray Cancer Institute in the United Kingdom, where he headed the Division of Experimental Oncology. Prior to this, he received his Masters degree from Cambridge University and his Ph.D. in 1980 from the world-renowned Institute of Cancer Research in London.

Dr. Joiner is the Graduate Officer of the Department of Radiation Oncology within the Wayne State University School of Medicine, where he teaches. He also has taught for 22 years, and continues to teach, on the international ESTRO radiobiology course. Additionally, Dr. Joiner serves as an editor of the textbook, “Basic Clinical Radiobiology”.

Dr. Joiner will be lecturing on:

• Quantifying cell kill and cell survival
• Particles in radiotherapy
• The linear-quadratic approach to fractionation
• The LQ-model in practice – introduction to calculations

View faculty profile for Dr. Joiner

[top]

Dr. Marianne Koritzinsky is a Scientific Associate at Ontario Cancer Institute in Toronto and an assistant professor in the Department of Radiation Oncology. She is cross-appointed to the Institute of Medical Sciences. She has academic background in biophysics followed by PhD training in molecular cancer and tumor biology. Her primary research goal is to mitigate the adverse effects tumor hypoxia on tumor radiation response, metabolism and metastasis. Her research program implements biochemical and molecular biology approaches to study cellular signaling and metabolism in the laboratory, as well as genetic and pharmacological approaches to improve radiation responses in experimental tumor models. Dr. Koritzinsky has been a faculty member on the European Society for Radiotherapy and Oncology (ESTRO) teaching course on Basic Clinical Radiobiology since 2007. She is also faculty of a University of Toronto teaching course on Clinical and Experimental Radiobiology. She has contributed as an author to a chapter in the Basic Clinical Radiobiology textbook used worldwide. Dr. Koritzinsky is the recipient of several awards and honors, including a VENI award from the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research and an ESTRO-VARIAN-Juliana-Denekamp research award. Recently, she was the recipient of a prestigious Terry Fox Foundation New Investigator Award.

Dr. Koritzinsky will be lecturing on:

• Hallmarks of cancer
• The oxygen effect
• Biological response modifiers in tumors – approaches and conepts

View faculty profile for Dr. Koritzinsky

[top]

Dr. Stanley Liu is a Radiation Oncologist at the University of Toronto, Department of Radiation Oncology, and a scientist at the Sunnybrook Research Institute, Division of Biology. He received his PhD, MD and specialist certification in Radiation Oncology from the University of Toronto. He recently returned from a post-doctoral fellowship at the Gray Institute in the University of Oxford, UK, where his research demonstrated the therapeutic potential of using Notch pathway inhibitors to improve tumor radioresponse. In addition to his clinical practice, he runs an active research laboratory identifying and elucidating novel downstream effectors of Notch that may enhance Notch pathway-based therapies, and also serve as valuable prognostic biomarkers.

Dr. Liu will be lecturing on:

• Modulating the tumour microenvironment: therapeutic strategies

View faculty profile for Dr. Liu

[top]

Dr. Mike Milosevic MD, FRCPC is a Professor in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of Toronto and a Radiation Oncologist at Princess Margaret Hospital with clinical interests in gynecologic and genitourinary malignancies. His research revolves around new biology-based approaches to improving the effectiveness of radiotherapy for patients with cervix cancer, particularly in relation to tumor hypoxia and altered metabolism. Dr. Milosevic’s other main research interest is in the application of image-guided, adaptive, external beam radiotherapy or brachytherapy to treat gynecologic cancers.

Dr. Milosevic will be lecturing on:

• Clinical efforts to modify tumor hypoxia

View faculty profile for Dr. Milosevic

[top]

Dr. Gerard Morton is an Associate Professor in the University of Toronto Department of Radiation Oncology and staff radiation oncologist at the Sunnybrook Odette Cancer Centre.  His main academic interest lies in clinical brachytherapy research, particularly with regard to high-dose radiotherapy of prostate cancer.  He has completed several clinical trials of novel brachytherapy fractionation protocols in prostate cancer, and continues to research integration of advanced and functional imaging into brachytherapy treatments.

Dr. Morton will be lecturing on:

• Clinical radiobiology of brachytherapy

View faculty profile for Dr. Morton

[top]

Dr. Albert J. van der Kogel worked from 1971-1984 at the Radiobiological Institute TNO in Rijswijk, The Netherlands, first as a PhD student and later as a staff member. From 1984-1987 he was associate professor at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and guest scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, were he worked on tissue tolerance to pi-mesons. In 1987 he moved back to The Netherlands were he was appointed professor of clinical radiobiology and head of the laboratory at the department of Radiation Oncology of the Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen. Since 2011 he is emeritus professor in Nijmegen, and professor in the department of Human Oncology at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison.

Since 1996 he is Editor for biology of the journal Radiotherapy and Oncology, and from 1998 director of the ESTRO course “Basic Clinical Radiobiology”.

Among the honors he received are the ESTRO Breur Gold medal in 1994, the Bacq and Alexander Award of the European Society of Radiation Biology in 2002, and the ICRU Gray Medal in 2009. He has over 200 publications in peer reviewed journals.

He worked most of his career on late effects of radiation on normal tissues, with emphasis on the spinal cord as a model of the central nervous system. After starting the laboratory in Nijmegen another main area of research became the tumor microenvironment, notably the immunohistochemical and functional imaging of hypoxia and its dynamics in primary human tumor xenografts.

Dr. van der Kogel will be lecturing on:

• Cell survival – in vitro and in vivo
• Dose rate effect – intro to RB concepts
• The volume effect in radiotherapy

[top]

Dr. Shun Wong

Dr. Wong will be lecturing on:

• Pathogenesis of normal tissue side effects
• Retreatment tolerance of normal tissues

View faculty profile for Dr. Wong

[top]