Researchers from Cleveland Clinic, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and Moffitt Cancer Center have found that the genomic adjusted radiation dose (GARD) may be used to personalize radiotherapy (RT) to maximize the therapeutic effect of a given physical RT dose.
The research—published Aug. 4 in The Lancet Oncology journal—validates the association between GARD and radiation therapy outcome in a large cohort of patients, across seven different cancer types.
“As opposed to physical RT dose, which is the measure of what comes out of the machine and is delivered to the patient, GARD quantifies the biological effect on an individual patient of that delivered dose,” said Cleveland Clinic radiation oncologist and Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine Associate Professor Jacob G. Scott, the first author of the study. “What we’ve found by looking at 1,600-plus patients is that the physical dose of radiation does not associate with outcome (time to first recurrence and overall survival), but GARD does.”
The study represents the validation of a quantifiable parameter of the clinical effect of radiation; a parameter that serves as a predictor of the therapeutic benefit of RT for each individual patient.