Description
With the increase of lifespan, cancer has become the primary cause of death in many countries and ranks the second place in the world behind cardiovascular disease. In this context, radiotherapy plays a major role in the treatment of patients. Among the new promises of this technique, three modalities are of great interest to decrease the side effects of treatments and improve the quality of life of patients: Charged particle therapy, Flash therapy and Targeted Alpha Therapy (TAT).
The research in these domains presents both the biggest challenges and the biggest potential as they represent the treatments of the future. GANIL has significant assets to contribute to this research field, in terms of infrastructure, skills and network, to develop own projects and provide access to ion beams and radioisotopes to interdisciplinary research teams.
In the domain of TAT, the high intensity beams of SPIRAL2 are a great opportunity to study the production of -emitting radioisotopes. A research program centered on the production and the implementation of 211At in radiobiology experiments has been initiated and, within the REPARE ANR project, one day of beam time per month of SPIRAL2 operation is dedicated to the research on medical isotopes. It is planned to continue and intensify this research program along several main directions: the installation of an irradiation station in the linac hall, the study of radioisotopes other than 211At, the reinforcement of an interdisciplinary network with the identification of new indications and new therapeutic solutions, the development of new dosimetry tools and methods.
In the fields of charged particle therapy, GANIL benefits from the Carbon beams delivered at GANIL and the proximity of the future CyclHad hadrontherapy center. GANIL is currently involved in the development of a new protontherapy dosimeter that will be continued in the next years. It is planned to extent these development to Carbon ion therapy and to the implementation of radiobiology experiments at CyclHad.
Lastly, GANIL beams have advantageous characteristics, in terms of beam intensity and temporal structure to perform radiobiology studies of the FLASH effect, both on the SPIRAL2 facility, with proton or alpha beams, and the
GANIL facility with high intensity Carbon beams. One of the projects of GANIL is thus to make these beams compatible with radiobiology and instrumentation experiments.