The
world-wide pandemic continues to challenge our ability to communicate
effectively with our colleagues and to enable us to join together and
develop
the future directions. PTCOG is a conduit for the Particle Therapy
community to
Cooperate and has worked to provide opportunities to maintain
continuity. Our
PTCOG 2020 Online meeting was highly successful with positive comments
from all
Particle Therapy professionals including the exhibition and sponsors.
We have
continued to provide modest funding for projects that can be done under
the
constraints of the pandemic, and this year we congratulate Ray Mailhot
and his
colleagues who earned funding for “Individualizing
and Optimizing Proton Therapy Consolidation in the Management of
Lymphoma”.
Most of our topical Subcommittees are remaining active, and the
Thoracic
Subcommittee will soon be submitting yet another manuscript for
publication.
Still, our community thrives from physical contact amongst our
colleagues and
collaborative developments, which are presently challenged.
While we are
encouraged about the news of approved vaccines it is not fully clear
what the
timescale might be for full world-wide immunization and when
international
travel will return to normal. For this reason, combined with some
regions of
the world experiencing increasing infection rates, organising a regular
live
PTCOG meeting in 2021 unfortunately remains unpredictable. However, we
want to
try to provide the connectivity that we miss so much and have learned
more
about this from our experiences in the past year.
With that we announce the 59th Annual Conference of the Particle Therapy Co-Operative Group will now be held from Friday to Tuesday June 4-7, 2021.
PTCOG 59 will be held online. It
will
feature live presentations and recorded materials on demand for
registered
participants. So, what
does PTCOG 59 now look like and what are our plans and preparations for
this
meeting? We have collected and reviewed valuable feedback from our
Online 2020 meeting
and we are working on the following program:
With all of
the above stated, we officially open a call
for abstracts and invite
the Particle Therapy Community to share their research efforts on this
meeting.
We also ask you to Save the New Date for this meeting and consider treating this time as a focused meeting in
the way you would
when traveling to a live meeting, The online abstract
submission form will
be available by the end of January, 2021 if not before and the submission
deadline is
expected to be toward the end of February. Submission guidelines and
final
topics will also be shared in the coming weeks but we expect all the
regular
topics to remain with some possible additions.
Please visit
our PTCOG 59 website at www.ptcog59.org as we continue to update new
information relevant to this event.
We look forward to meeting you in 2021 and working with you on creative developments in the field of Particle Therapy.