Speaker
Description
With the growing number of cancer patients requiring radiation treatment, advances in accelerator technologies are essential. ELI Beamlines explores laser-driven accelerators as competitive sources of ionizing radiation for therapy compared with conventional machines. Their spatially compact, potentially more economical architectures—and their distinctive temporal and dose-rate characteristics—could broaden access to advanced radiotherapy and may offer added biological advantages.
This talk will primarily focus on proton therapy and, in particular, on laser-driven proton (LDP) beams. Proton therapy is a modern method of cancer treatment that offers a number of advantages over standard (photon and electron) radiotherapy, such as more precise dose delivery to the tumor, thereby minimizing damage to surrounding healthy tissue. At ELI Beamlines, the LDP acceleration system is powered by the L3 HAPLS petawatt laser, integrated with the ELIMAIA (ELI Multidisciplinary Applications of laser-Ion Acceleration) laser plasma accelerator and the ELIMED (ELI MEDical application) beam transport and dosimetry line, supporting multi-shot proton delivery for user experiments. Initial radiobiology campaigns at this platform have spanned over normal and cancer cell models in both 2D and 3D (e.g., fibroblasts and tumor spheroids), as well as vertebrate and avian embryos, with endpoints including DNA double-strand break foci (γH2AX, 53BP1), apoptosis, survival, stress-response markers, and transcriptomics. These studies illustrate the platform’s potential for ultrafast radiation biology, while the biological effectiveness of LDP, and its interplay with delivery time structure, continue to be systematically evaluated.
Furthermore, ELI Beamlines also provides laser-driven electron capabilities: the ALFA station delivers high-repetition-rate (up to kHz), tens-of-MeV electron beams suitable for application-oriented studies; the ELBA station provides GeV-class electrons for advanced experiments, encompassing and extending the VHEE regime.
Recent LDP results will be summarized, followed by a discussion of the practical specifics and peculiarities of working with laser-driven beams; future research opportunities and possibilities enabled by these sources will also be outlined.