FLASH-RT to Overcome Challenges of Old Radiation Therapy After Effects

Release Date: 01-Nov-2020

Every day novel cancer research articles and papers are published in different journals and all aim to provide an effective therapy for the cancer patients. In Clinical Cancer Research, it has been published that a novel therapy could be as effective as old and traditional therapy without any of the side effects. It has been observed that radiation therapy, which is among the old and traditional therapies available for cancer, exposes the tumor as well as healthy neighbouring cells for several minutes, which could however develop adverse side effects in the patients such as inflammation and cognitive impairment.

But on the other side, FLASH-radiation therapy which is an extension of the radiation therapy only exposes the tumor cells for fraction of seconds. The use of FLASH-RT on the cancer cells eliminates the chances of developing any toxicity in the patients as it is not impacting the neighbouring healthy cells for long period of time. For research purpose, researchers investigated the same in the mice model. They exposed the brain tumor of the mice with ultra-high dose rate of radiation therapy.

 The radiations were exposed on the mice model for several sessions and the doses were delivered at quicker rates. It was found that the treatment was not developing any adverse effects associated with cranial irradiation. Also, the ultra-high dose rate of radiation and quicker dose rate were as effective as the traditional therapy. By analyzing the effectiveness of FLASH-RT, it was estimated that this in the future will become a widespread option for millions of cancer patients worldwide. It is estimated that this respective technology can deliver productive results for several different cancer types such as lung cancer and skin cancer.