Radiotherapy

Learning how to use synchrotron radiation to treat cancer

About half of all cancer patients receive radiation therapy during their treatment. Typically, they receive doses of up to 70 Gray, divided into daily doses of 2 Gray. The dose is divided up to prevent damaging healthy tissue.

However, we know from work done during the space race in the 1960s, that if very narrow beams of radiation are used the damage done to healthy tissue is significantly reduced, even at higher doses.

This led researchers at Brookhaven in the USA to investigate the use of narrow micro-beams of synchrotron radiation (which can be up to 10 billion times more intense than the radiation generated by hospital radiotherapy machines) to treat cancer. The hope was that the treatment would be more effective because a larger dose could be given safely.

Our challange is to try and understand the complex radiobiology and dosimetry of this synchrotron micro-beam radiation therapy (MRT). Our preliminary experiments have shown that using MRT it is possible to safely deliver doses up to 400 times higher than the normal clinical dose.

Cross-hatch pattern of synchrotron MRT applied to mouses leg
and the leg after treatment

This figure shows the cross-hatched pattern of mirco-beam radiation used for treatment and the uneffected leg of a mouse, after it has been exposed to an 800 Gray dose, 400 times the normal clinical dose.

Moreover, although the synchrotron MRT had little effect on healthy tissue, it caused significant reductions in tumour growth, when used to treat experimental models of cancer.

We are now trying to work out why tumours are destroyed by MRT but healthly tissue is resistant to it, with the ultimate aim of optimising MRT treatment for use in human patients.

Monash researchers involved

External collaborators

Dr David Blakey, Radiation Oncology Victoria, Australia
Dr Robin Anderson and Ms Tina Restall, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, Australia
Dr Kai Rothkamm, Gray Cancer Laboratory, University of Oxford, UK
Dr Sarah Meachem and Ms Saleela Ruwanpura, Prince Henry's Institute, Clayton, Australia
Dr Naoto Yagi, SPring-8/JASRI, Japan

Radiotherapy

A functioning blood vessel in the path of a synchrotron micro-beam (Jeff Crosbie)

This image shows tissue after it has been exposed to a narrow micro-beam of high energy radiation. The path of the micro-beam is shown as a dotted line. A functioning blood vessel can be seen in the path of the mirco-beam. Normal tissue is highly resistant to radiation damage when micro-beams are used, opening up the possibility of using synchrotron micro-beams to treat cancer.