• Its efficacy is limited by the toxicity of ionising radiation to the normal tissue, whose effects can be both acute (hours to weeks after treatment) and chronic (months to years). Late effects can be very serious and have a great impact in the quality of life of cancer survivors, years after treatment. With an increasing population of cancer survivors (2 million in the UK, of which probably ~100.000 are in Wales), chronic radiation injury is a mounting health care concern.
  • Currently, radiotherapy doses are generally defined so that less than 5% of patients will suffer serious late toxicity. Thus, the ability to stratify patients according to biomarkers of radiation sensitivity would be highly desirable, as it would allow prescribing personalised radiation doses. Likewise, insights into the nature of late toxicity could lead to co-treatments to ameliorate these side effects.