2024
12:00 PM - 01:00 PM
Tuesday Tue
Location
Medical Physics Seminar - Clemens Grassberger
Combining Radiotherapy with Immunotherapy - The Role of Mechanistic Modeling and How Physicists Can Contribute
Time:
12:00pm – 1:00pm Seminar & Discussion
Location:
Zoom Webinar
Webinar Registration:
https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_IZTRbNMDSQqCto4Bqlcqaw
Check your email for the Zoom webinar link after you have registered
Speaker
Dr. Clemens Grassberger, Ph.D., Department of Radiation Oncology at The University of Washington
Dr. Grassberger is an Associate Professor in Radiation Oncology at University of Washington, with a joint appointment at Fred Hutch Cancer Center. He has a long standing interest in mathematical modeling of cancer and its response to treatment, particularly the immune response to radiotherapy and how to optimize radiation-drug combination regimen. He has received the 2021 AAPM John S. Laughlin Early-Career Scientist Award and his work describing the first framework to calculate dose to circulating lymphocytes won the Roberts Prize 2022 for best paper published in Physics in Medicine and Biology. The newly established Grassberger Lab @UW/FHCC - funded by NIH and several foundations - has a wide range of interests, connected by mathematical modeling of cancer treatment response. We build models that either predict clinically actionable outcomes in patients or simulate biological system to gain increased understanding of underlying mechanisms.
Abstract
The impacts of radiation on the immune system have long been observed but there remain many outstanding questions. With the increasing application of radiotherapy to metastatic patients and the introduction of immunotherapy in multi-modality regimen together with radiation, there is a greater need for understanding the impacts of radiation therapy on the immune system. There has been a surge in published studies on radiation-induced lymphopenia, and on the impact of various radiotherapy treatment parameters on patient immunity during and after treatment. This seminar will explore the role medical physicists and mechanistic modeling can play in translational research that investigates the impact of radiotherapy on the patient’s immune system.