Deep lying tumours, such as the aggressive brain cancer glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) remain very difficult to treat and existing therapies offer only marginal increase in survival rates. Photomedical therapies have shown to be very effective, but they remain mainly limited due to their insufficient depth of light penetration into tissue, not able to reach deep-lying tumours and cancer cells. Current neutron-based therapies on the other hand have sufficient penetration depth but are not precise enough to target specific forms of cancer.
The relative survival rate for adults diagnosed with GBM is less than 30% within one year of diagnosis, and only 3% of patients live longer than five years after initial diagnosis. With over 28,000 new cases of malignant GBM diagnosed every year in the European Union (EU) and the 240,000 patients globally each year, research for new therapies is urgently needed.
The goal of the FRINGE project is to lay the foundation for a new treatment, proposing a genuinely new neutron-activated technology. The project aims to provide proof-of-principle for this future technology. At its heart are chemical agents, photosensitisers normally used in photomedical therapies activated by light, that will accumulate in the tumours especially in brain cancers where the blood brain barrier is compromised. The photosensitisers designed for FRINGE will contain metal centres like Gadolinium (Gd) to enable interaction with incoming neutrons and facilitate the transfer of neutron energy into electron excitation and of the chemical agent, similarly to what happens with light. The interaction of the FRINGE compounds with ambient oxygen will then generate reactive oxygen species that will kill the tumour cells from the inside.
