Project description
Identification and targeted radiation of hypoxic brain tumour regions
Sometimes subpopulations of cells within a single tumour have different genomes or observable characteristics. The heterogeneous nature of two of the most aggressive types of brain cancers can make it difficult to treat them effectively. Low oxygenation (hypoxia) is linked to radiotherapy resistance in heterogeneous cancers, yet tumour hypoxia is not currently measured when planning radiotherapy treatment. With the support of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the HYPERACT project aims to enable non-invasive characterisation of tumour hypoxia and delivery of effective radiation specifically to hypoxic areas. They will combine magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography to visualise hypoxia followed by targeted carbon ion radiotherapy.
Objective
Glioblastoma and skull base chordoma are two of the most aggressive types of brain cancers and have an extremely poor prognosis, with most tumours recurring within months of surgical and chemoradiation treatments. Recurrence is caused by tumour heterogeneity, as regions of the tumour with different biological properties respond differently to treatment. Tumour hypoxia (low oxygenation) is the leading cause of resistance to radiotherapy in heterogeneous cancers and is linked to poor patient prognosis. Effectively counteracting tumour hypoxia requires delivering higher doses of radiation selectively to hypoxic tumour regions. This is hard to achieve with conventional radiation treatment, where a uniform moderate radiation dose is delivered to the entire tumour target and dose-escalation strategies are limited by toxicity constraints established to limit damage to important surrounding brain structures. Standard radiotherapy plans do not incorporate any measure of tumour hypoxia, due to limitations in imaging techniques currently used for planning. The work proposed in this fellowship aims to improve radiation treatment for heterogeneous cancers by combining quantitative MRI/PET imaging, to non-invasively characterise regions of tumour hypoxia, and carbon ions radiotherapy, to deliver higher doses of radiation to those regions, whilst sparing surrounding healthy tissue. This strategy will deliver a more effective radiation dose distribution, providing an opportunity to improve local tumour control and patients’ survival outcomes and quality of life.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European FellowshipsCoordinator
20133 Milano
Italy