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The European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU)

Towards clinical trials in spatially fractionated radiotherapy

125,360
Awarded Resources (in node hours)
Vega CPU
System Partition
13 November 2023 - 12 November 2024
Allocation Period

Radiotherapy (RT) is one of the most frequently used methods for cancer treatment (above 50% of patients will receive RT). Despite remarkable advancements, the normal tissues tolerances continue being the main limitation in RT, still compromising an efficient treatment of radioresistant tumors (i.e., gliomas) or paediatric cancers.

To overcome this limitation, the project proposes to explore new techniques based on novel dose delivery methods and different particle types. This project aims at advancing some of spatially fractionated radiation therapy (SFRT) towards clinical trials.

The project aims at carrying out the first veterinary trials of proton minibeam radiation therapy in dogs bearing spontaneous gliomas. Additionally, the work will continue on adequate dosimetry protocols, including the determination of correction factors for high-resolution detectors and on the optimisation of the extraction system and beamline elements of cyclotron-based proton therapy centres to enable the generation of magnetically focused proton minibeams.

Finally, additional dosimetry studies of an optimised form of GRID therapy will be performed. The small field sizes used and voxelised structures require important calculation resources.