High-Energy Charged Particles for Spatially Fractionated Radiation Therapy

Spatially fractionated radiotherapy (SFRT) offers a gain in normal tissue sparing withrespect to standard seamless irradiations. The benefits of SFRT may be further enhancedby replacing the commonly used photon beams by charged particles. Along this line,proton SFRT has already shown a significant widening of the therapeutic window forradioresistant tumors in preclinical studies. The goal of this work was to investigatewhether the use of superior energies as compared to the clinical ones, as well as heavyions could lead to a further improvement of SFRT. New facilities such as FAIR, RAON,or some others associated with the International Biophysics collaboration will be ableto provide very intense high-energy ion beams, enabling the experimental evaluation ofthe Monte Carlo simulations reported in this work. Our results indicate that proton SFRTcould benefit from the use of higher beam energies (1 GeV). Concerning heavy ions, ˜such as carbon or neon, the main advantage would be the possible theragnostic use.Biological experiments are needed to validate these results, and they will be the subjectof future experimental proposals at those new facilities