State-of-the-Art Equipment for Preclinical Targeted Radiotherapy

Every two minutes, someone in the UK is diagnosed with cancer and half of cancer patients receive X-ray radiotherapy as part of their therapy. Although advances have been made to better target X-ray radiation beams to where just the tumour is located or use protons beams instead, not all cancer types or stages can be treated with these. Equally, not all tumours respond well to radiotherapy, meaning that it can recur within a few years.

There is therefore still a great need to progress radiation research to 1) not only better predict but also monitor early-on whether radiotherapy is successful, 2) create radioactive injectable therapies that irradiate tumours across the whole body at once, regardless of their size, and 3) test radiotherapy in combination with other drugs that can sensitise tumours (and not healthy tissues) to radiation, thereby decreasing the occurrence of treatment-related side effects.

Here, we will achieve this by purchasing a radiotherapy machine that can accurately target X-ray beams for radiotherapy to tumours in mice and rats in a way that mimics what happens in the clinic. In this way, we can test our well-established (and some novel) injectable radioactive imaging compounds for their ability to monitor how effective new X-ray radiotherapy strategies are in killing tumour cells without damaging healthy tissues. This approach can also be used to predict radiotherapy effectiveness.

Equally, acquiring the animal radiotherapy machine will allow us to create new injectable, radioactive drugs that specifically home to cancer cells anywhere in the body and compare the positives and negatives of this approach to X-ray radiotherapy. Through these studies, we will also understand the relationship between radiation dose delivered and damage to tumour cells as well as healthy cells.

This, alongside computer modelling, will inform future clinical trials in terms of required and prescribed injected amounts of radioactive compounds for effective tumour killing at levels that do not damage healthy tissues.

Finally, studies will be carried out to ascertain how effective X-ray radiotherapy and the radioactive compounds are in killing cancer cells that have been pretreated or simultaneously treated with chemo- or other therapies. Hopefully, we will show that combining these therapies with the X-rays or radioactive compounds increases the overall tumour killing ability and work out how this is achieved.