New radiation therapy technique for battling cancer shows promise

Researchers from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have shown the potential of a new radiation therapy technique to deliver effective, targeted doses to cancer patients.

In a paper published in Scientific Reports, the FLASH radiotherapy (FLASH-RT) method selectively killed cancer cells while minimally damaging nearby healthy cells. FLASH-RT aims to provide rapid, targeted, high-dose radiation therapy as an alternative to weeks of low-dose radiation in other radiotherapy settings. Previously, FLASH-RT has required complex and enormous gymnasium-sized machines that are impractical for clinical use. However, LLNL has found linear induction accelerators (LIAs) to be powerful enough to deliver a sufficient dose while only three meters long, which LLNL previously used in its weapons program.

"You're combining technologies that were developed for weapons-either diagnostics or weapon design itself-and spinning off something that could potentially be a major breakthrough in cancer radiotherapy," said Stephen Sampayan, lead author of the study.

To ensure a high enough dose to kill cancer cells but short enough to limit damage to healthy cells, the LLNL researchers used an LIA that produces four beamlets placed symmetrically around the patient, as opposed to one large electron beam. The high doses exceed those conventional accelerators can make, and the researchers could steer and focus the FLASH-RT beam by controlling the magnets in the accelerators. Future research hopes to show LIA FLASH-RT's viability in distributed cancer settings, not just concentrated examples like tumors.

You can read more from the study here.