The pain of cancer radiotherapy is expected to be solved by flash proton radiotherapy in the future

Author: Wang Fang radiotherapy is one of the main methods to treat cancer According to statistics, about 70% of cancer patients need radiotherapy in the process of cancer treatment However, this treatment requires patients to be exposed to radiation for a long time and a large area, which is often easy to cause damage to normal cells of human body, resulting in hair loss, fatigue and other side effects Is there a more effective and safe radiotherapy plan? Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have designed a new proton flash radiotherapy system, which can precisely control the beam flux in milliseconds and effectively avoid damage to normal tissues while killing cancer cells This may represent a great change in the field of oncology in the future The report was recently published in the International Journal of radiation oncology, biology, and physics The journal is the official journal of the American Society for radiotherapy and Oncology (ASTRO), known as the "red skin journal" in the field of radiation oncology, and also the authoritative and most influential journal in the field of international tumor radiotherapy In the experiment of https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijrobp.2019.10.049, researchers designed and manufactured a novel "flash" radiotherapy (RT) device, which can provide flash (60-100gy / s) or standard (0.5-1gy / s) dose rate using double scattering protons in CT The researchers used the device to compare the efficacy of flash proton radiotherapy and standard proton radiotherapy (RPT) in mice with pancreatic flank tumors In the study of acute intestinal injury after 15gy whole abdominal proton radiotherapy, the number of proliferating cells in each crypt of flash proton radiotherapy mice was significantly higher than that of PRT mice In addition, compared with standard proton radiotherapy, flash proton radiotherapy retains a higher percentage of regeneration crypt In further experiments, the researchers observed the effects of two methods on intestinal fibrosis in mice, and found that flash proton did not cause the common side effect of intestinal fibrosis Flash dose radiation can better maintain the proliferation of intestinal crypt and inhibit the formation of fibrosis In short, this is the first study to prove that the use of protons rather than electrons to produce flash dose and the current accelerator for clinical treatment is feasible Researchers have begun to explore how to turn this therapy into clinical trials, including the design of a flash delivery system for humans Reference: [1] design, implementation, and in vivo validation of a new proton flash radiation therapy system [2] cancer: giving entire course of radiation treatment in less than a second is feasible