Obiettivo
Cancer is responsible for 25% of all deaths in Europe and is the biggest killer of people aged 45-64 and 1 in 3 EU citizens can expect to deal with a cancer episode in their lifetime. The cost of treatment in Europe is over €50 billion and fighting the disease is a major EU priority. Radiotherapy is in the most used treatment and recent advances such as IMRT and other conformal radiotherapy solutions are significantly improving treatment success rates. However, existing dosimetry techniques are not capable of delivering the high resolution, tissue equivalence and high speed measurements required for IMRT calibration. This leads to lengthy set-up times, seriously limiting the number of patients that can be treated. Radi-Cal will look to build on recent breakthroughs in CVD diamond technology (realised with EC support) and develop an innovative, high resolution, monolithic 2D CVD diamond array based dosimeter which will deliver the levels of performance required by IMRT and other conformal radiotherapy solutions whilst reducing calibration and set-up time by a factor of 7, thereby allowing more patients access to conformal radiotherapy which will significantly improve treatment success rates. The science and technology required to do this will be challenging, however our consortium comprises some of Europe's leading research and industrial companies. Our innovations are in CVD diamond structure and contacts for a 2D sensor; 2D array sensor fabrication and radiation shielding; ultra low 2D array readout electronics. The market potential for such a product is over €130 million. Although European SME’s dominate the market for radiotherapy dosimetry systems this situation is being seriously threatened by large non-EU enterprises such as Varian, who are now targeting dosimetry. As European SMEs, we urgently need to beat our competition to an IMRT dosimetry solution to protect our market and enable us to compete against internationally.
Campo scientifico
Argomento(i)
Invito a presentare proposte
FP7-SME-2008-1
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Meccanismo di finanziamento
BSG-SME - Research for SMEsCoordinatore
353 Barna, Co Galway
Irlanda