Through existing advances in the field of radiation oncology, it has become clear that success is best achieved when experts in biology, physics, and clinical medicine collaborate. However, as technology and treatment paradigms grow more complex, it has become increasingly difficult for experts to maintain cutting-edge specialization in their own specific discipline and at the same time, converge to facilitate multi-disciplinary collaboration. While current graduate training does expose trainees to fields outside their own, this exposure is insufficient to develop meaningful research collaborations across the modern oncology workforce. A formal training program that can provide both breadth and depth in the theme areas of tumor biology, tumor immune microenvironment, advanced imaging and treatment technologies, and informatics is needed to allow trainees to develop a set of common cross-disciplinary fundamentals that can then be used to accelerate multidisciplinary research in radiation oncology. Given the amount of data generated in the fields of cancer biology, medical physics, and clinical radiation oncology, we envision that our ROBIN program cross training core, METEORITE (METEOR Integrated Training Environment), will use data science and informatics as the common language to facilitate communication and promote interdisciplinary collaboration, with the ultimate goal of leveraging this model across the ROBIN network to increase collaboration among the larger oncology workforce.
The major goals of METEORITE:
- develop an interdisciplinary training program within our own METEOR ROBIN Center by integrating pre-existing courses and established training programs to support METEOR and related science.
- develop new digital content resources for key high need topics such as clinical trial design and the fundamentals of TME for non-specialists to be used within METEORITE but also disseminated across the wider ROBIN network.
- develop and host both in-person and virtual seminar series and symposia to promote trainee cohesion within METEOR and across the ROBIN network.
METEORITE Seminars
- April, 2024 – Dr. Randi Foraker, Professor of Medicine, taught a series of biostatistics workshops for the Meteorite trainees. Topics included:
- Common phase 1 and phase 1/2 trial designs
- Advantages and disadvantages of superiority trials
- Advantages and disadvantages of non-inferiority trials
- Powering studies
- Bayesian probability in trials
- April, 2024 – Clinical Trial Bootcamp with Dr. David Sher as featured speaker.
- November, 2023 – Dr. Schwarz’s ROBIN Seminar