FLASH VHEE Radiotherapy for Cancer Treatment: Nanodosimetry and Dose Studies

Radiotherapy depends on accurate delivery of a certain amount of dose (enough to kill the tumour) to the right place. For this purpose modern radiotherapy equipment has extensive QA and is combined with advanced dose measurement capabilities.

VHEE radiotherapy (in the energy range of ~70 to 250 MeV) is currently under development and promises rapid delivery of dose by means of electromagnetically steered e-beams. Because of the high energy, the delivery is range-insensitive and hence it is generally applicable even in inhomogeneous parts of the body. It also has the potential to be significantly cheaper than radiotherapy equipment in use at present.

Furthermore VHEE has the potential for extremely rapid and large dose delivery to cancerous tissue. It is also able to take advantage of recent in vivo "FLASH" studies -in which a high dose is delivered to tissue extremely rapidly -allowing complete eradication tumours while promising reduction in the occurrence and severity of early and late complications affecting normal tissue. FLASH radiotherapy is a rapidly evolving field and is a "hot topic" with the mechanism little understood -and hence it is a timely area for a PhD studentship.

This studentship will explore delivering high energy beams to phantoms, plasmids, cell cultures and will entail investigating cell damage at the level of the bond breakage of DNA. It notable that the advantage of rapid dose delivery (typically sub-second delivery) has been demonstrated in animals and also on a limited number of human patients -but with limited understanding of the underlying mechanism. This studentship will entail a cross-fertilisation of the engineering behind the delivery of dose and the damage incurred to cancerous cells, with a view to understanding the underlying mechanism that allows healthy tissue to show little damage to exposure to very high doses.

In this project we will study:

Rapid dose delivery -utilising the facilities at Daresbury laboratory and CERN.
Damage to plasmids
Damage to cells at the level of DNA

The project will entail close collaboration with radiotherapists, clinicians and clinical scientists. The research will build upon earlier studies, albeit limited, of a Manchester PhD student who performed experimental studies on the damage incurred to DNA (using plasmids) by very high energy electron beams.

Experiments will be conducted on the 250 MeV electron beam facility at CERN in 2021 and at Daresbury laboratory's CLARA facility (due to be upgraded to 250 MeV) in 2022. This will be a unique opportunity to use a recently developed high-energy accelerators to develop a potential new paradigm in radiotherapy.