Microbeam radiation therapy (MRT) provides tremendous promise for cancer patients due to its ability to destroy tumor cells while protecting surrounding healthy tissue. Yet its clinical use has been limited by the size of the massive electron accelerators called synchrotrons needed to generate the beams. Now, a new microbeam emitter developed at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has scaled down the technology, opening the doors for clinical research.
A multidisciplinary team of scientists built a device using carbon nanotube-based x-ray source array technology that can generate microbeam radiation with similar characteristics to the beams generated by synchrotron radiation.
Studies have shown that microbeam radiation can destroy tumors and increase survival by as much as a factor of ten in brain tumor-bearing animals treated with the technique. While the potential of the technology has been proven, the massive infrastructure needed to undertake the studies has prevented research from being researched for clinical use.
Radiation therapy in current clinical use uniformly bathes tumors in high-dose radiation, but the toxicity from the radiation limits the size of tumors that can be safely treated. MRT doses the area with thin parallel planes of radiation, up to a few hundred microns in width, creating a striped pattern of irradiation across the tumor. In tests with lab animals, this approach leads to lower toxicity and the ability to safely deliver a much higher dose to treat radioresistant tumors such as brain tumors.
