Editorial
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Dear PTCOG Community, It is with great joy and enthusiasm that I announce the release of our first issue of the PTCOG Newsletter Particles. Those of you that have my age will recall that the Particles Newsletter was circulated among PTCOG members many years ago, but it was eventually terminated. I yearned for the re-establishment of a PTCOG Newsletter, and I am very grateful to Damien Weber, Huan Giap, Wolfgang Sauerwein and Dagmar Baroke for volunteering to serve as editors of this paper. |
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II felt that PTCOG needs a newsletter for several reasons. Let me start by saying how proud, honoured, and humbled I am to have been elected PTCOG Chairman during the annual meeting in Miami in 2022, succeeding Jay Flanz who brilliantly led the association during the difficult times of the pandemic. I am lucky to be taking the reins during this truly exciting time, along with my vice-chairs Anita Mahajan and Hsiao-Ming Lu. We have come out of the pandemic and attendance at the annual meeting in Madrid was the largest ever. There was a feeling of excitement and energy in the air, which was directly due to the efforts of the scientific, educational, and local organizing committees.
At the same time, I am convinced that PTCOG must be much more than an annual meeting. The particle therapy community is indeed growing exponentially worldwide. The PTCOG Steering Committee, once able to meet around a table, has now 92 Institutional Members - and counting. We have reached 17 clinical and technical sub-committees, including the new Early Career Researcher (ECR) Sub-Committee that is greatly increasing participation of young physicians, physicists, and researchers in our society. The Steering Committee is more involved in proposing topics for the meeting and in the elections of new members of the program and educational sub-committees. The PTCOG scientific journal, International Journal of Particle Therapy, received its first impact factor in 2023 and has started a publishing partnership with Elsevier, one of the top scientific publishers worldwide. We have signed a MoU with PTCOG-AO, that follows those already signed with the other continental particle therapy associations: PTCOG-NA and EPTN. We have established a precise and transparent procedure to award research grants. The call for proposals collected 25 applications worldwide, and 3 excellent proposals in physics, medicine and biology were funded for 1 year. Finally, we signed a contract with a renowned Professional Congress Organizer company, Kenes Group, which will also work on the association management.
Clearly, the amount of information and news about PTCOG and particle therapy in general, is so large that a newsletter was definitely needed. Our focus is to create more value for our association members, enhance their experience, increase member satisfaction, attract new members, and collaborate with national and international associations to increase awareness about particle therapy. Particles will be the perfect tool for it. You all are welcome to contribute to the PTCOG Newsletter. Should you have any scientific highlights, new clinical trials, information about facility construction or operation, or any other news about particle therapy, please do get in contact with our editors to include news in the next issue. Please also distribute Particles to non-PTCOG members with the aim of expanding our community.
I hope that you enjoy this edition of the newsletter and kindly think about how you would like to be involved with the many inspiring things that are happening here. I am really excited to tackle the many items I have on my agenda, and I promise to do my best for PTCOG.
Sincerely yours,
Marco Durante, Ph.D.