The NIH pediatric/young adult chordoma clinic and natural history study: Making advances in a very rare tumor.

Background: Chordomas are rare tumors arising from the skull base and spine, with approximately 20 pediatric chordoma cases in the Unitedn States per year. The natural history and optimal treatment of pediatric chordomas, especially poorly differentiated and dedifferentiated subtypes, is incompletely understood. Herein, we present findings from our first National Cancer Institute (NCI) chordoma clinic and a retrospective analysis of published cases of pediatric poorly differentiated chordomas (PDC) and dedifferentiated chordomas (DC).

Clinical outcomes of head and neck adenoid cystic carcinoma patients treated with pencil beam-scanning proton therapy.

Objective: The aim of this study was to evaluate the outcome of patients with head and neck adenoid cystic carcinoma (ACC) treated using pencil beam scanning proton therapy (PBS PT) at our institution.

Materials And Methods: Thirty-five patients who underwent treatment with PBS PT for ACC between 2001 and 2017 were included. Local control (LC), distant control (DC), progression-free survival (PFS), overall survival (OS) and their prognostic factors were evaluated.

Defining Clinical Indications of Proton Beam Therapy at National Level in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi Particle Therapy Centre (SPTC) is establishing proton beam therapy (PBT) services within Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). Thus, national guidelines for the pertinent draft, and recommendations of PBT for cancer patients are utmost important. Saudi Particle Therapy Centre invited a panel of expert radiation oncologists practicing within KSA to formulate national clinical practice guidelines for the referral, absolute and relative indications and dose/fractionation for PBT.

Long-Term Outcomes and Prognostic Factors After Pencil-Beam Scanning Proton Radiation Therapy for Spinal Chordomas: A Large, Single-Institution Cohort.

Purpose: To evaluate the efficacy and safety of high-dose pencil-beam scanning proton therapy (PBS-PT) in the adjuvant treatment of spinal chordomas.

Methods And Materials: Between 1997 and 2015, 100 patients with spinal chordomas (median age, 56 years; range, 25-81 years) were treated with adjuvant PBS-PT at the Paul Scherrer Institute: cervical (n = 46), thoracic (n = 4), lumbar (n = 12), and sacral (n = 38). The majority (88%) received PBS-PT alone rather than combined photon-proton therapy.

Excellent Pathologic Response and Atypical Clinical Course of High-Grade Extremity Sarcoma to Neoadjuvant Pencil Beam Scanning Proton Therapy.

Neoadjuvant radiation therapy, followed by definitive surgical resection, remains the standard of care for resectable high-grade and unresectable soft tissue sarcomas. Proton therapy offers the promise of highly conformal dose distributions with improved sparing of neighboring normal tissues as compared with conformal and intensity modulated photon techniques. It is unclear whether proton therapy may offer an improved tumoral response, especially with dose escalation, in this relatively radio-insensitive tumor type.