Global democratisation of proton radiotherapy.

Proton radiotherapy is an advanced treatment option compared with conventional x-ray treatment, delivering much lower doses of radiation to healthy tissues surrounding the tumour. However, proton therapy is currently not widely available. In this Review, we summarise the evolution of proton therapy to date, together with the benefits to patients and society. These developments have led to an exponential growth in the number of hospitals using proton radiotherapy worldwide. However, the gap between the number of patients who should be treated with proton radiotherapy and those who have access to it remains large. We summarise the ongoing research and development that is contributing to closing this gap, including the improvement of treatment efficiency and efficacy, and advances in fixed-beam treatments that do not require an enormously large, heavy, and costly gantry. The ultimate goal of decreasing the size of proton therapy machines to fit into standard treatment rooms appears to be within reach, and we discuss future research and development opportunities to achieve this goal.

Clinical oncology in resource-limited settings.

Infectious Agents and Cancer is introducing a new section of Clinical Oncology with the main objective of stimulating debate through articles published in the section. Infectious diseases have been the major causes of morbidity and mortality in human populations, and have dominated the medical approach to clinical and public health. Successful efforts to control mortality from acute infections have paved the way for chronic, mostly indolent, infections to become major causes of morbidity. Cancer, hitherto thought to be rare in resource-limited settings, is becoming a major contributor. The changes in mortality patterns are due, in part, to diseases linked to rapid changes in lifestyle, urbanization, and pollution. These diseases include many of the non-infection associated cancers. However, there is a dearth of information about the burden, pathogenesis, and therapeutic approaches about cancer in resource-limited countries. There are also substantial other challenges, including economic, infrastructure, technology, and personnel. The Journal advocates for interactive local-global (lo-bal) efforts to generate relevant knowledge about cancer burden, pathogenesis, and therapeutic approaches using a bottom-up approach to sharpen the focus on local and global relevance of research and clinical and public practice, particularly in resource-limited countries. The section on Clinical Oncology in Infectious Agents and Cancer will harness these "lo-bal" strategies to reduce substantially the time from concept, discovery, and development and implementation of locally and globally applicable diagnostic and therapeutic technologies.

Clinical and epidemiologic profile of breast cancer in Tanzania.

PURPOSE: breast cancer is a highly heterogeneous disease globally. Public health prevention measures require an understanding of the burden of breast cancer and its risk factors. The purpose of this study was to describe the clinical, pathologic, and epidemiologic characteristics of breast cancer patients in Tanzania. METHODS: data was abstracted from the medical records of all breast cancer patients attending Ocean Road Cancer Institute (ORCI) over a 2-year period from July 2007 to June 2009. Tumor tissue paraffin blocks were collected for all patients with available tissues for the determination of estrogen receptor (ER) and progesterone receptor (PR). Data for all patients was analyzed descriptively and by using unconditional logistic regression, by comparing early stage (ES), defined as stages I and II and late stage (LS), defined as stages III and IV patients to obtain odds ratios (ORs), 95% confidence intervals (CIs), and P-values. RESULTS: among the 488 patients, stage was determined for 356~patients, 90.7% of whom presented in LS. Of the 57 tumor tissues, 49.1% were ER-/PR-. Patients with ulceration (OR = 4.97; 95% CI= 1.07, 23.04; p=0.04) and peau d'orange (OR= 6.78; 95{\%} CI $=$ 1.48, 31.17; p=0.01) were more likely to present in LS rather than ES. Male breast cancer accounted for 2.9% of all breast cancers and inflammatory breast cancer (IBC) comprised 4.3-5.5% of cases based on registered t4d diagnosis or the criteria of IBC signs, if t4d was not reported in the medical records. CONCLUSION: most breast cancer patients in Tanzania are diagnosed at advanced disease stages with about half of the tumors being ER-/PR-. These data strongly support that reducing barriers to care, down-staging of disease at diagnosis, implementation of clinical guidelines for management of advanced cases, and palliative care are the four most essential factors that need to be addressed to reduce morbidity and mortality from breast cancer in Tanzania. Further research is needed to quantify the magnitude and molecular features of two relatively rare forms of breast cancer that may account for a greater proportion of the burden of breast cancer in Tanzania compared to the USA and Western Europe: male breast cancer and IBC.