UVic researchers work on lower-energy radiation machine for cancer treatment

UVic researchers work on lower-energy radiation machine for cancer treatment
CHEK

UVic medical physicist Magdalena Bazalova-Carter and graduate student Dylan Breitkreutz are researching how to reduce the cost of radiation therapy. Photo courtesy UVic.

UVic medical physicist Magdalena Bazalova-Carter and graduate student Dylan Breitkreutz are researching how to reduce the cost of radiation therapy. Photo courtesy UVic.

Research at the University of Victoria is looking at ways to turn down the dose of radiation treatment to make it more cost-effective and accessible for cancer patients.

UVic medical physicist Magdalena Bazalova-Carter has been working with a U.S. radiation oncologist for seven years to develop a new kind of X-ray machine.

Bazalova-Carter and graduate student Dylan Breitkreutz are assembling a scaled-down version of a machine proposing to deliver a lower-energy beam from multiple directions at the same time.

A prototype resembling a CT scan is being built in Nevada and Bazalova-Carter says there should be little impact to healthy tissues, while the tumour receives the same dose.

UVic says in a release that radiation currently requires very expensive machines in specialty built rooms to contain harmful radiation waves, making treatments very costly and limit availability for their use.

The high-energy machines used for treatment sell for up to $5 million each and require rooms with two-metre-thick concrete walls to protect others from radiation waves.

Bazalova-Carter is helping to develop a machine that is expected to cost about a tenth of that price with radiation waves contained by one-centimetre thick lead walls.

“It’s not a solution for all radiation therapy cancer treatments, because some tumours are deep in the body and you need that high voltage to reach them. But if you’re talking about lung or breast cancer, it could be a good option,” Bazalova-Carter said in a release.

The new machine could be available within five years.

Other research by Bazalova-Carter is the use of gold nanoparticles for radiation treatment, which can be injected into a cancer patient to concentrate radiation in a tumour and reduce damage to healthy tissue that surrounds it.

The gold nanoparticles are most effective in combination with the low-energy radiation Bazalova-Carter is studying.

The university says radiation therapy is recommended for almost half of the more than 200,000 cancer cases Canadians develop each year.

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