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 59^th 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:

• A full 4-day program with multiple tracks allowing original and seminal scientific and educational content
• Opportunities for young investigators to present their work.
• Plenty of time with appropriate technology outside of the scientific program to allow for improved networking opportunities
• Discussion forums with key topics and question on themes provided to initiate improved discussions
• Sufficient time, including dedicated time, to visit the exhibitions and interact with our industry partners
• Inclusion of the PTCOG Steering Committee, Sub Committee and support meetings
• Some cultural and social activities

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.