Radiotherapy biobanking: current landscape, opportunities, challenges, and future aspirations

Abstract

Half of all cancer patients receive radiotherapy, which makes a substantial contribution to their long‐term disease control/cure. There are significant inter‐patient differences in response, both in terms of efficacy and toxicity (frequently delayed onset) which are difficult to predict. With the introduction of technological improvements (e.g. stereotactic body radiotherapy and proton therapy) and development of combination therapies (e.g. radiotherapy and immune checkpoint inhibition), predictive biomarkers are needed even more. Whilst genomic studies have contributed significantly to predictions of response to anticancer therapy, there is no doubt that more information can be gathered from patient tissue samples. Patients are willing to donate their tissues to biobanks and wish them to be used as widely as possible for high‐quality research. We report here a survey of the current practices in the UK from several groups collecting material from patients in radiotherapy trials and have identified barriers to collecting and sharing data and samples. We believe the current situation represents a significant missed opportunity to improve the personalisation of radiotherapy. We propose a greater involvement of patients and/or their advocates, a standardisation of the patient information leaflet, consent form content and data set, with easy linkage to clinical data, which would facilitate widespread sample and data discovery and availability to other researchers. The greater sharing of data and samples, nationally and internationally, would facilitate robust multicentre studies and avoid duplication of effort.

Biobanks as an important tool in modern translational oncology

“…The same is true for radiotherapy. Biobanks with samples collected during radiotherapy to study the molecular mechanisms of individual susceptibility or resistance to radiotherapy exist (Ward et al, 2022), and in our opinion their network (as well as the network of biobanks with samples collected during the course of any other type of therapy, for example immunotherapy) should also broaden. Creation of broad networks of biobanks and merging single biobanks into consortium will also allow to answer the research questions and overcome research challenges which would not be possible otherwise, for example to address the challenges of the rare malignant neoplasms diagnostic and treatment.…”