Research Reviews

Despite both clinical and pre-clinical technological advancements, a lack of effective treatment for patients with primary brain tumors and those originating from metastasis remains. With the 5-year survival rate of patients experiencing primary glioblastoma...

The development and construction of clinical proton therapy centers has almost become the norm for any major cancer treatment center. Roughly 58 proton centers are currently operating throughout the world, and an estimated 52 (this number could be greater) are currently being built or are planned for construction. With the recent emergence of so many proton centers more so than ever, one would think the use of protons in cancer is a new form of treatment. However, the truth of the matter is it’s basically the opposite.

Minibeam radiation therapy (MBRT) is an innovative synchrotron radiotherapy technique able to shift the normal tissue complication probability curves to significantly higher doses. However, its exploration was hindered due to the limited and expensive beamtime at...

Over 60% of cancer patients worldwide will receive radiotherapy as a part of their overall treatment plan. Recently, stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) has been recognized as a favorable treatment option for those cancer types that remain inoperable. SBRT administers very high doses of radiation in a small number of fractions, and has been shown to achieve 3-year control rates of roughly 90% in stage 1 NSCLC’s.

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is characteristically radioresistant tumor type with roughly 25% of patients requiring radiotherapy as form of treatment. With poor clinical outcomes (5-year survival of 7%) new and innovative treatments are required to improve patient outcome. Due to the lack of an effective treatment in the clinic for PDAC, translational research yielding clinically relevant results is necessary to develop new and effective treatment.

A new paper titled “Bioluminescence Tomography – Guided Radiation Therapy for Preclinical Research” has been published in the International Journal of Radiation Oncology. The Xstrahl SARRP system was used for the research conducted in the published paper, the study details how Bioluminescence has enabled researchers to precisely visualize their tumors in vivo.