Right-time Adaptive Particle Therapy Of canceR
Personalisation through anatomical PLUS biological adaptation
RAPTORplus is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Network training 18 doctoral candidates across a multidisciplinary and intersectoral programme spanning academia, clinics, and industry. Fellows gain hands-on experience with state-of-the-art particle therapy infrastructure and work directly on solutions designed to translate into clinical practice and commercial products.
Beneficiaries & partners
Call for Application
Funded by the Horizon Europe Framework Programme of the EU.
About RAPTORplus
From precision to confidence in every fraction
Particle therapy enables highly precise cancer treatments by exploiting the unique physical properties of charged particles. However, this precision also makes treatments sensitive to day-to-day anatomical and biological changes, including tumour response, inflammation, organ motion, cavity fillings and patient weight variations.
Adaptive particle therapy addresses these challenges by updating the treatment plan during the course of therapy. RAPTORplus advances this concept by ensuring that adaptation is fast, reliable, evidence-based, and clinically scalable, so that precision is maintained throughout the entire treatment course.
Building on RAPTOR: What is new in RAPTORplus?
Our previous Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action was the Innovative Training Network RAPTOR, funded under Horizon 2020. RAPTOR established the foundations of online adaptive particle therapy (OAPT) by developing key tools, concepts, and expertise across imaging, planning, and verification to in principle enable real-time adaptations within a treatment fraction.
RAPTORplus is the next step. It moves beyond feasibility and isolated solutions. In order to make OAPT a sustainable treatment approach, it is imperative to solve two fundamental challenges:
- Successfully implementing OAPT requires more than just assembling pertinent hardware and software components. It demands a cohesive integration that ensures seamless functionality and highest efficiency of marketable solutions that provide optimal clinical benefit. It is most relevant to address the economic pressure in European healthcare systems as the precision of particle therapy is reflected by its costs. It is therefore of paramount importance
- To foster efficient clinical realisations of OAPT, with a minimal dose burden and duration of treatment fractions,
- To safely unleash the full potential of OAPT and make it widely accessible through technological completion, and
- To triage OAPT only if beneficial in the individual context, indicated by biomarkers and biological models, i.e. to personalise adaptions by anatomical and biological indicators.
- A new generation of talented professionals with diverse intellectual capabilities, equipped with transferable skills and a holistic mindset, must be educated in all fields related to adaptive PT through a multidisciplinary and intersectoral training program. While the medical physics community provide courses, symposia and workshops on PT, no single (national) school provides coherent interdisciplinary and intersectoral training in adaptive particle therapy including a secondment experience in academia, clinic and industry. The low number of PT facilities per country makes it clear that comprehensive training for sustainable OAPT can only succeed in an international and interdisciplinary context.
- Successfully implementing OAPT requires more than just assembling pertinent hardware and software components. It demands a cohesive integration that ensures seamless functionality and highest efficiency of marketable solutions that provide optimal clinical benefit. It is most relevant to address the economic pressure in European healthcare systems as the precision of particle therapy is reflected by its costs. It is therefore of paramount importance
RAPTORplus will master the aforementioned challenges through its dedicated training and research program. It will create awareness for the necessity and complexity of OAPT among the next generation of research leaders, medical physicists and entrepreneurs. Eighteen doctoral candidates (DCs) will work towards facilitating most cost-effective adaptation in PT, i.e. to perform it online in a safe and fast way whenever beneficial in the individual context, e.g. indicated by appropriate image-based biomarkers, biological models or other response data, and to omit otherwise.
Our research focus
The three tightly integrated RAPTORplus research work packages address the challenges inherent in the key components necessary for the durable clinical integration of right-time adaptive particle therapy.
Efficient realization: Clinical implementation of online adaptive particle therapy
To make the potential clinical benefits of online-adaptive particle therapy widely available to as many patients as possible in increasingly strained healthcare systems, it is crucial to ensure efficiency. Due to the limited number of treatment rooms, cost of PT is highly dependent on the time per treatment session and the highly qualified staff involved. OAPT treatment sessions should not be much longer than standard PT sessions and require workflows that involve parallelisation of tasks, a high degree of automation and less manual interaction. RAPTORplus will provide scientific guidance for time- and resource-efficient OAPT workflow realizations (Projects 1-4) and will exemplify this balance between effectiveness and efficiency in paediatric patients (Projects 5-6).
Technological completion: Developments for broad and safe use
Basically all new PT centres have access to cone-beam CT (CBCT). CBCT imaging eliminates the time and uncertainty associated with long-distance couch repositioning after imaging, but suffers from longer imaging time and poorer image quality. RAPTORplus will work on optimised and quality-assured CBCT imaging for accurate adaptive PT treatment planning (Projects 7-9). It will also evaluate the added benefit from treatment verification strategies – based on prompt gammas, fast neutrons and iono-acoustic waves – at different technological readiness levels to support the safety of online adaptations in particle therapy (Projects 10-12).
Biomarker-based adaptation: Personalised adaptation beyond anatomy
To perform adaptations at the right time and in the right way, it is relevant to continuously gain information about early tumour response and toxicity. Biological responses to RT occur at different timescales, from the (sub-)cellular level to macroscopic morphological changes. Functional imaging-based biomarkers, e.g. from quantitative MR, provide spatio-temporal information about this response, including inter- and intra-tumour heterogeneity. RAPTORplus will specifically focus on advancing the generation of knowledge regarding the biological response to particle beams at the micro- to macroscopic scale (Projects 13-15). Early treatment adaptation through predictive patient surveillance is beneficial for the healthcare system and the individual patient but relies on both a regular response monitoring through longitudinally available biomarkers for early treatment response and accurate and reliable models of response detection and prediction. RAPTORplus will leverage existing and refined biomarker-response models and integrate them for the first time systematically into robust adaptive treatment planning and related decisions including those for the optimal allocation of healthcare resources (Projects 16-19).
News & Articles
Newsletter RAPTOR n*8, December 2025
Welcome to the eighth issue of the RAPTOR newsletter! As we celebrate the final months of the RAPTOR project, we are delighted to share the
Newsletter RAPTOR n*7, August 2025
Welcome to the seventh issue of the RAPTOR newsletter! As we approach the conclusion of the RAPTOR project, we are proud to share the Summer
Join the Advanced Medical Physics School 2025 at Lake Como – Apply by April 15!
Don’t Miss the Advanced Medical Physics School 2025! An exciting opportunity for medical physics professionals is coming your way! The Advanced Medical Physics School, organized
Members of the RAPTORplus Consortium
RAPTORplus employs 18 doctoral candidates at the premises of 16 European institutions from academia, clinic and industry. It brings together more than 30 partners having one aim in common:
To facilitate most effective adaptation in particle therapy.
