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Christopher M. Nutting (born 5 April 1968) is a British Professor of Clinical Oncology and medical consultant, specializing in head and neck cancers, who has helped develop Intensity-Modulated Radiotherapy (IMRT), [1] an advanced form of Radiation therapy.
Nutting received a BSc with 1st class honours (Medicine and Cell Pathology) from University College London in 1989 and Middlesex Hospital, University of London. In 1992 he was awarded a 1st Class MBBS from Middlesex Hospital at the University of London. In 2001 he received a Medical Doctorate (MD Res) at The Institute of Cancer Research, University of London, and he was awarded a PhD from City University London in 2012.[ citation needed ]
In 2001 he was appointed Consultant Clinical Oncologist at the Royal Marsden Hospital and Honorary Senior Lecturer in Clinical Oncology at the Institute of Cancer Research; in 2002 he was appointed Clinical Director of the Head and Neck Unit at London’s Royal Marsden Hospital. [2] and in 2003 he became National Clinical Lead in Head and Neck Cancer, appointed by the Department of Health (UK) and the Cancer Services Collaborative.
In 2007 he was elected Honorary Faculty member at The Institute for Cancer Research. In 2009 he was appointed Co-Chair of The Clinical and Translational Radiotherapy and Radiobiology Working Group of the NCRI, and between 2006-12 he chaired the National Cancer Research Institute's Head and Neck Cancer Clinical Studies Group (CSG).[ citation needed ]In 2021, he was appointed Medical Director of a new Royal Marsden Private Care facility in Cavendish Square, London.
Nutting was elected Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences [3] in 2018 and Fellow of the Institute of Physics in 2019.[ citation needed ] He is also President Elect [4] of the Oncology Section of the Royal Society of Medicine and will serve as President for the years 2020-2022.
In 2022, Nutting was appointed as a Senior Investigator of the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), following open competition by one of England's leading medical research organisations. This is in addition to his roles as Consultant Clinical Oncologist at The Royal Marsden and Professor of Radiotherapy at The Institute of Cancer Research, London.
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In collaboration with the Institute of Cancer Research, he and his team at the Royal Marsden Hospital have managed a series of randomised trials using IMRT aimed at reducing the potentially debilitating side-effects of radiotherapy treatment for head and neck cancers.
The research has involved four trials – PARSPORT, [5] COSTAR, [6] ART DECO [7] and DARS, [8] which is investigating whether IMRT reduces difficulty in swallowing for patients with throat cancer. Each has focussed on different cancer sites respectively to assess the impact in reducing the following principal side-effects - Xerostomia (dry mouth), hearing loss, long-term or permanent damage to the larynx and difficult in swallowing.
The beneficial outcomes in the PARSPORT trial, [9] was instrumental in prompting the UK Department of Health to recommend IMRT to all cancer networks in the UK treating head and neck cancers. [10]
In 2014, Nutting was instrumental in the Royal Marsden Hospital and the Institute for Cancer Research being granted Medical Research Council funding to install one of Britain's first MR Linac machines which combines two technologies for the first time – an MRI scanner to precisely locate the tumour and a linear accelerator that will accurately deliver doses of radiation even to moving tumours. The MR Linac was installed at the Royal Marsden's site in Sutton, Surrey, and treated its first patients in 2019.
In 2018 Nutting was elected to the Fellowship of the Academy of Medical Sciences, one of the highest accolades in medicine and he is one of the youngest recipients of the award.
In 2018 Nutting played a significant role in a campaign to extend vaccinations against the human papillomavirus (HPV) to adolescent boys in the UK after girls aged 12–13 had been routinely given the immunisation via schools since 2008. [11] The campaign was successful with the UK government announcing in July 2018 that it would introduce gender neutral vaccinations for all 12 and 13 year-olds following a recommendation from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) which stated that a gender-neutral programme would be cost-effective.
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Radiation therapy or radiotherapy, often abbreviated RT, RTx, or XRT, is a therapy using ionizing radiation, generally provided as part of cancer treatment to control or kill malignant cells and normally delivered by a linear accelerator. Radiation therapy may be curative in a number of types of cancer if they are localized to one area of the body. It may also be used as part of adjuvant therapy, to prevent tumor recurrence after surgery to remove a primary malignant tumor. Radiation therapy is synergistic with chemotherapy, and has been used before, during, and after chemotherapy in susceptible cancers. The subspecialty of oncology concerned with radiotherapy is called radiation oncology. A physician who practices in this subspecialty is a radiation oncologist.
External beam radiotherapy (EBRT) is the most common form of radiotherapy. The patient sits or lies on a couch and an external source of ionizing radiation is pointed at a particular part of the body. In contrast to brachytherapy and unsealed source radiotherapy, in which the radiation source is inside the body, external beam radiotherapy directs the radiation at the tumour from outside the body. Orthovoltage ("superficial") X-rays are used for treating skin cancer and superficial structures. Megavoltage X-rays are used to treat deep-seated tumours, whereas megavoltage electron beams are typically used to treat superficial lesions extending to a depth of approximately 5 cm. X-rays and electron beams are by far the most widely used sources for external beam radiotherapy. A small number of centers operate experimental and pilot programs employing beams of heavier particles, particularly protons, owing to the rapid dropoff in absorbed dose beneath the depth of the target.
A radiation oncologist is a specialist physician who uses ionizing radiation in the treatment of cancer. Radiation oncology is one of the three primary specialties, the other two being surgical and medical oncology, involved in the treatment of cancer. Radiation can be given as a curative modality, either alone or in combination with surgery and/or chemotherapy. It may also be used palliatively, to relieve symptoms in patients with incurable cancers. A radiation oncologist may also use radiation to treat some benign diseases, including benign tumors. In some countries, radiotherapy and chemotherapy are controlled by a single oncologist who is a "clinical oncologist". Radiation oncologists work closely with other physicians such as surgical oncologists, interventional radiologists, internal medicine subspecialists, and medical oncologists, as well as medical physicists and technicians as part of the multi-disciplinary cancer team. Radiation oncologists undergo four years of oncology-specific training whereas oncologists who deliver chemotherapy have two years of additional training in cancer care during fellowship after internal medicine residency in the United States.
In the field of medical treatment, proton therapy, or proton radiotherapy, is a type of particle therapy that uses a beam of protons to irradiate diseased tissue, most often to treat cancer. The chief advantage of proton therapy over other types of external beam radiotherapy is that the dose of protons is deposited over a narrow range of depth, which results in minimal entry, exit, or scattered radiation dose to healthy nearby tissues.
M. Krishnan Nair was an Indian oncologist. He was the founding director of the Regional Cancer Centre, Thiruvananthapuram, a director of the S.U.T. Institute of Oncology, and Trivandrum Cancer Center(TCC), part of SUT Royal Hospital in Thiruvananthapuram (Trivandrum) and a professor at the Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences & Research in Kochi. The Government of India awarded him the fourth highest civilian award of the Padma Shri, in 2001 for his contributions in the cancer care field.
Fast neutron therapy utilizes high energy neutrons typically between 50 and 70 MeV to treat cancer. Most fast neutron therapy beams are produced by reactors, cyclotrons (d+Be) and linear accelerators. Neutron therapy is currently available in Germany, Russia, South Africa and the United States. In the United States, one treatment center is operational, in Seattle, Washington. The Seattle center uses a cyclotron which produces a proton beam impinging upon a beryllium target.
In radiotherapy, radiation treatment planning (RTP) is the process in which a team consisting of radiation oncologists, radiation therapist, medical physicists and medical dosimetrists plan the appropriate external beam radiotherapy or internal brachytherapy treatment technique for a patient with cancer.
Tomotherapy is a radiation therapy modality, in which the patient is scanned across a modulated strip-beam, so that only one “slice” of the target is exposed at any one time by the linear accelerator (linac) beam. The three components distinctive to this modality are: (1) a collimator pair that defines the length of the strip, (2) a binary multileaf collimator whose leaves open and close during treatment to modulate the strip’s intensity, and (3) a couch that scans the patient across the beam at a fixed speed during the treatment delivery.
Image-guided radiation therapy is the process of frequent imaging, during a course of radiation treatment, used to direct the treatment, position the patient, and compare to the pre-therapy imaging from the treatment plan. Immediately prior to, or during, a treatment fraction, the patient is localized in the treatment room in the same position as planned from the reference imaging dataset. An example of IGRT would include comparison of a cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) dataset, acquired on the treatment machine, with the computed tomography (CT) dataset from planning. IGRT would also include matching planar kilovoltage (kV) radiographs or megavoltage (MV) images with digital reconstructed radiographs (DRRs) from the planning CT.
The Danish Head and Neck Cancer (DAHANCA) group was established in 1976 as a working group by the Danish Society for Head and Neck Oncology with the primary aim to develop national guidelines for the treatment of head and neck cancer in Denmark.
Professor Dame Janet Elizabeth Siarey Husband is Emeritus Professor of Radiology at the Institute of Cancer Research. She had a career in diagnostic radiology that spanned nearly 40 years, using scanning technology to diagnose, stage, and follow-up cancer. She continues to support medicine and research as a board member and advisor for various organisations.
The UPMC Hillman Cancer Center (Hillman), previously titled the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute (UPCI), is a National Cancer Institute (NCI)-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center located in the Hillman Cancer Center in the Shadyside neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, adjacent to UPMC Shadyside. The only NCI-designated cancer center in Western Pennsylvania, Hillman is composed of collaborative academic and research efforts between the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), and Carnegie Mellon University. Hillman provides clinical cancer care to some 74,000 patients treated at its facilities at both the Hillman Cancer Center location in the Shadyside neighborhood of Pittsburgh and at UPMC-affiliated sites throughout Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, and overseas locations. Founded in 1984, Hillman became the youngest cancer center in history to achieve NCI-designation. As of 2007, Hillman had received nearly $200 million in funding from the National Cancer Institute, which ranks it as one of the top ten cancer research institutes.
Carlos A. Pérez is an American radiation oncologist. He is well known for his contributions to the clinical management of patients, especially those with gynecologic tumors and carcinoma of the prostate, the breast and head and neck.
Ketayun Ardeshir Dinshaw FRCR was a prominent personality in the field of Indian medicine and played a significant role in the evolution of modern cancer care in India, and the development of effective radiation therapy. In 2001, the President of India conferred on her the Padma Shri. A prominent news channel has described her as: “The ultimate hope and the last possible post to cling onto for the cancer-struck in India”. Over a thirty-year period, Dinshaw revolutionised cancer medicine in India, refining multi-modal treatments as the exception rather than the rule.
Michael John Peckham was a British oncologist and artist. As a cancer physician he is best known for his contribution to the treatment of testicular cancer. His paintings were first exhibited in 1962 and he showed in numerous mixed and solo exhibitions.
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Docrates Cancer Center is the first and currently the only private hospital in the Nordic countries that comprehensively specialises in cancer treatment. It operates in Helsinki, Finland. It characterises its operations as those complementing the public sector. Docrates Oy was established in 2006 and the hospital started its operations at the premises of Eira Hospital in autumn 2007. It moved to its own premises in Jätkäsaari, Helsinki, in 2009, where it has hospital rights. There is a ward and Health and Recovery Center located at Docrates Cancer Center. Among other things, diagnostics, pharmacotherapy, radiation therapy and isotopic treatments are carried out at the hospital. Cancer surgeries are performed in partner hospitals. Docrates also participates in clinical trials and the testing and development of new treatments.
Timo Joensuu is a Finnish oncologist, associate professor of clinical oncology in University of Helsinki, researcher of new cancer treatments and developer of an internationally new hospital concept. He is a co-founder of Docrates Cancer Center in Helsinki and was its clinical director until 2014, after which he has been concentrating mostly on clinical work with the patients as the chief oncologist.
Steve Webb is a British medical physicist and writer. He is an emeritus professor of physics at the Joint Department of Physics in the Institute of Cancer Research and the Royal Marsden Hospital. He was editor-in-chief of Physics in Medicine and Biology for six years, being succeeded in 2011 by Simon Cherry.
James Ralston Kennedy "RP" Paterson, CBE, MC, MD, FRCSEd, FRCR, DMRE (Cantab) was a radiologist and oncologist in Scotland. Along with Herbert Parker, pioneered the development of the Paterson-Parker rules for the Radium Dosage System also known as the Manchester system.