Zapping cancer in a single treatment: FLASH therapy is feasible

Photo credit–Roberts Proton Therapy Center

CANCER DIGEST – Jan. 11, 2020 – Imagine that one day in the not-too-distant future, your cancer is treated with an entire course of radiation delivered in a single one-second dose.

For current cancer patients who undergo their radiation treatments over the course of weeks, such a treatment might seem impossible, but researchers at Penn Medicine say they have demonstrated the ability to deliver an entire course of radiation in less than a second.

Called FLASH therapy, the researchers showed how using proton radiation rather than electron radiation allows them to deliver the dosage equivalent of an entire course of conventional radiation therapy in less than a second. They published their findings in the International Journal of Radiation Oncology.

The study’s co-senior author James M. Metz, MD, director of the Roberts Proton Therapy Center and chair of Radiation Oncology explained in a press release that other researchers have generated similar doses using electrons, but those don’t penetrate deep enough into the body to be clinically useful for cancer. Other groups he says have tried with photons but currently available treatment machines don’t have the ability to generate the necessary dose.

Enter the use of current proton therapy machines modified to achieve the FLASH dose needed to kill the tumor in a single application.

“We’ve been able to develop specialized systems in the research room to generate FLASH doses, demonstrate that we can control the proton beam, and perform a large number of experiments to help us understand the implications of FLASH radiation that we simply could not have done with a more traditional research setup,” Metz said in the release.

The next step involves optimizing the dosing and transferring the technology from the research room to clinical trials of FLASH in humans.

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