The present incidence of 17 million new cases per year globally predicted to increase to 27.5 million new cases per year by 2040. Radiotherapy (RT) is effective in cancer patients and is already involved in cancer cures. To increase the rate of diagnosis of cancer in the early, curative, stage implies an increasing need for therapeutic interventions including RT.

The use of novel beams with strikingly different characteristics has led to exciting evidence of enhanced therapeutic benefit, eg., therapy using very high dose per fraction, very high dose rate (> 40 Gy/s, “FLASH”), and “mini-beam” (MBRT). This evidence, together with developments in our understanding of personalised medicine based on the biology of individual tumours, now provides the impetus for a radical transformation of ion beam therapy (IBT).

While incremental development of cyclotron-, synchrotron-, and linac-based solutions are being pursued to enhance clinical capability, laser-driven proton and ion sources are disruptive technologies that offer enormous potential to satisfy the anticipated growth in demand for IBT by providing more flexible, compact and cost-effective high energy particle sources.

In this workshop we will discuss the state of the art in the provision of IBT and various approaches by which to deliver the step change in capability required to meet the projected growth in demand.