Innovative Unconventional Radiotherapy Approaches for Unresectable Bulky Tumors

Oncologic treatments developed enormously over the last decades. This is true for surgery, but also and especially for systemic therapy and radiotherapy. Globally, these developments have led to improved treatment outcomes in terms of tumor control and survival. However, not all cancer patient categories can benefit from it in a proportional way. Highly complex and hard-to-treat unresectable bulky tumors represent an unfavorable group of patients whose outcome remains poor and that are still usually predestined to palliative or, at best, supportive care. However, newly emerging innovative and unconventional radiotherapy approaches like partial tumor irradiation, GRID, and LATTICE seem to show a promising therapeutic potential where such complex clinical scenarios are concerned, being able to convert a palliative into a potentially curative disease.

This Research Topic will focus on clinically exploited novel radiotherapy strategies and approaches used in the treatment of unresectable bulky tumors. We welcome Original Research and Review Articles on the following themes:

- The combination of unconventional radiotherapy approaches with systemic therapies
- Mechanisms behind the responses to novel radiotherapy strategies including the immunomodulatory potential.
- Emerging unconventional radiotherapy techniques like minibeam, microbeam, FLASH, and others

Please note: manuscripts consisting solely of bioinformatics, computational analysis, or predictions of public databases which are not accompanied by validation (independent clinical or patient cohort, or biological validation in vitro or in vivo, which are not based on public databases) are not suitable for publication in this journal.

Keywords: FLASH, minibeam, microbeam, radiotherapy, novel radiotherapy, bulky tumors

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.