The brightest gamma ray beam ever created- more than a thousand billion times more brilliant than the sun- has been produced in research led at the University of Strathclyde- and could open up new possibilities for medicine.
General Physics
Sep 19, 2011
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A radiotherapy technique which 'paints' tumors by targeting them precisely, and avoiding healthy tissue, has been devised in research led by the University of Strathclyde.
General Physics
Feb 23, 2021
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Targeted radiation therapy that is less harmful to healthy cells could see the light of day thanks to a team of French researchers from the Laboratoire de Chimie Physique - Matière et Rayonnement (CNRS/UPMC) working in collaboration ...
Analytical Chemistry
Jan 14, 2014
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Current nanomedicine research has focused on the delivery of established and novel therapeutics. But a UNC team is taking a different approach. They developed nanoparticle carriers to successfully deliver therapeutic doses ...
Bio & Medicine
May 2, 2012
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Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center researchers have again proven that injecting multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) into tumors and heating them with a quick, 30-second laser treatment can kill them.
Bio & Medicine
Feb 9, 2012
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An international team of physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory has succeeded in using intense laser light to accelerate protons to energies never before achieved. Using this technique, scientists can now accelerate ...
General Physics
Nov 2, 2009
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Melanomas are the most common oral cancers in dogs. They are highly metastatic and conventional chemotherapy does not increase survival time. Canine oral melanomas are similar to human melanomas; thus, research is being conducted ...
Veterinary medicine
Jun 23, 2023
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A new study using mass spectrometry is helping piece together what happens when DNA that has been sensitized by the oncology drug 5-fluorouracil is subjected to the ionising radiation used in radiotherapy.
General Physics
Sep 3, 2019
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Cancer treatment often involves a combination of chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Chemotherapy uses medication to stop cancer cells reproducing, but the medication affects the entire body. Radiotherapy uses radiation to kill ...
Condensed Matter
Aug 7, 2019
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To understand why some cancer cells resist radiotherapy, an international team of researchers has used crystallography to "photograph" the first moments of the molecular ballet that allows these cells to repair their DNA. ...
Molecular & Computational biology
Oct 9, 2018
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Radiation therapy (also radiotherapy or radiation oncology, sometimes abbreviated to XRT) is the medical use of ionizing radiation as part of cancer treatment to control malignant cells (not to be confused with radiology, the use of radiation in medical imaging and diagnosis). Radiotherapy may be used for curative or adjuvant cancer treatment. It is used as palliative treatment (where cure is not possible and the aim is for local disease control or symptomatic relief) or as therapeutic treatment (where the therapy has survival benefit and it can be curative). Total body irradiation (TBI) is a radiotherapy technique used to prepare the body to receive a bone marrow transplant. Radiotherapy has several applications in non-malignant conditions, such as the treatment of trigeminal neuralgia, severe thyroid eye disease, pterygium, pigmented villonodular synovitis, prevention of keloid scar growth, and prevention of heterotopic ossification. The use of radiotherapy in non-malignant conditions is limited partly by worries about the risk of radiation-induced cancers.
Radiotherapy is used for the treatment of malignant tumors (cancer), and may be used as the primary therapy. It is also common to combine radiotherapy with surgery, chemotherapy, hormone therapy or some mixture of the three. Most common cancer types can be treated with radiotherapy in some way. The precise treatment intent (curative, adjuvant, neoadjuvant, therapeutic, or palliative) will depend on the tumour type, location, and stage, as well as the general health of the patient.
Radiation therapy is commonly applied to the cancerous tumour. The radiation fields may also include the draining lymph nodes if they are clinically or radiologically involved with tumour, or if there is thought to be a risk of subclinical malignant spread. It is necessary to include a margin of normal tissue around the tumour to allow for uncertainties in daily set-up and internal tumor motion. These uncertainties can be caused by internal movement (for example, respiration and bladder filling) and movement of external skin marks relative to the tumour position.
To spare normal tissues (such as skin or organs which radiation must pass through in order to treat the tumour), shaped radiation beams are aimed from several angles of exposure to intersect at the tumour, providing a much larger absorbed dose there than in the surrounding, healthy tissue.
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