FLASH VHEE Radiotherapy Machine System Design

This studentship is focussed on the development of a unique machine to deliver FLASH radiotherapy. To achieve this goal we anticipate strong collaboration with the Christie NHS, STFC's Daresbury Laboratory and CERN. FLASH-RT entails delivering a high dose over a sub-second timescale and there have been limited experiments on plasmid, living cells, and animals which indicate cancerous regions suffer lethal damage whereas healthy tissues show little impairment.

We plan to investigate an optimised overall system design to achieve high dose rate within a large tissue field concurrent with treatment of humans. This work will build on the VHEE machine design and make the substantial modifications necessary for FLASH delivery of radiotherapy. Existing electron machines, albeit at low energies, have already been modified to allow FLASH radiotherapy to be conducted - however this has only been on superficial skin cancers due to the limited energy penetration.

The student will have the potential to make a major contribution to an exciting and rapidly developing field. This method of delivering radiotherapy has the potential for a new paradigm in the treatment of cancer.