Centre for Women's Health Research

Improving radiotherapy outcomes

Laboratory head: Dr Carl Sprung

The majority of cancer patients will receive radiotherapy, making investigations into advances of this treatment important. The adverse response of the normal tissue to radiotherapy is a limitation in the use of radiation to kill tumour cells. To address this problem, two main strategies are being pursued in the laboratory.

The first is to predict the normal tissue response to radiotherapy at the molecular level with the goal of individualizing radiotherapy, ultimately resulting in higher cancer cure rates. The approach is to employ high throughput technologies to interrogate gene expression on a genome-wide scale to understand the effect of radiation at the molecular level and enable prediction of radiosensitivity. We use gene arrays containing millions of probes that are able to detect abnormalities at the exon level for every gene and capable of identifying splice variants, reported to be present in over 75% of all human genes.

A second strategy is to investigate the use of novel improved radiotherapy methods. One such advance is the use of an array of planar high intensity X-ray beams, called microbeams, accessed through the We Australian Synchrotron, which is capable of generating the high dose-rate microbeams with the necessary properties that conventional sources do not possess. The use of microbeam radiotherapy (MRT) has the potential to revolutionise cancer treatment. MRT in animal models has shown great promise with the ablation of tumours without serious effects to normal tissues. We are particularly interested in understanding the molecular and cellular responses to MRT, including the bystander effects that these microbeams may confer on unirradiated adjacent cells. This will advance the understanding of this remarkable phenomenon with the goal of facilitating application of MRT into the clinic.