The latter is the subject of a forthcoming paper by Dr. Could FLASH radiotherapy lead to an even greater immune response in patients with cancer? Another area of interest that the Columbia team is examining is the role oxygen depletion plays in FLASH’s ability to kill targeted tumors while sparing adverse effects on surrounding healthy tissue. Brenner and Cheng are currently exploring whether FLASH radiation treatment affects the immune response as does conventional radiation treatment. Ultimately, they want to answer the questions: Does FLASH radiotherapy work, and if so how does it work?ĭrs. Researchers from Columbia’s Department of Radiation Oncology, the HICCC, and CRR have established a team dedicated to FLASH radiotherapy research at Columbia-digging deep into the biology behind FLASH and working to uncover its underlying mechanisms. For instance, instead of a patient having to go in for 30 to 45 daily treatments of radiation, they could complete their radiation in just a few treatments.” “With FLASH, we would be capable of giving higher doses of radiation to patients, which has the potential to be more effective treatment that is less toxic and given much quicker. “The idea of delivering this new type of treatment is that it would be very targeted,” says Simon Cheng, MD, PhD, assistant professor of radiation oncology at Columbia closely collaborating with Dr. This novel approach was first presented by researchers at INSERM and the Gustave Roussy Institute in a 2014 paper published in the journal, Science Translational Medicine, that showed success of FLASH therapy in mouse models with lung disease. Previous studies, using mouse lung and brain models, have indicated that by reducing the time interval for delivering a single dose fraction from tens of minutes to a fraction of a second, detrimental effects to normal tissue near the tumor can be reduced, or even avoided altogether, without sacrificing the effectiveness of the radiotherapy in eliminating the cancer. “Rather than giving the treatment in a half-hour, FLASH radiotherapy proposes to give it in less than a second.” “Current radiotherapy treatments take close to a half-hour, so that the patient is immobilized for that period of time,” says leading radiation expert David Brenner, PhD, director of Columbia University’s Center for Radiological Research (CRR) and a member at the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center (HICCC). In the present review, we summarize the main data supporting the clinical translation of FLASH-RT and explore its feasibility, the key irradiation parameters and the potential technologies needed for a successful clinical translation.David Brenner, PhD, director, Center for Radiological ResearchįLASH radiotherapy is the fast delivery of ultra-high dose radiation a thousand times quicker than conventional radiotherapy. Indeed, preclinical studies on various animal models and a veterinarian clinical trial have recently shown that compared to conventional dose-rate RT, FLASH-RT could control tumors while minimizing normal tissue toxicity. Consisting of delivering doses within an extremely short irradiation time, FLASH-RT has been identified as a promising new tool to enhance the differential effect between tumors and normal tissues. In this context, FLASH-RT is emerging in the field. Nevertheless, the treatment of radiation-resistant tumors is still restricted by the dose-limiting normal tissue complications. Over the past decades, technological advances have transformed radiation therapy (RT) into a precise and powerful treatment for cancer patients.
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