Identification Of Highly Radiosensitive Patients May Lead To Side Effect-free Radiotherapy

An international group of scientists has taken the first step on the road to targeting radiotherapy dosage to individual patients by means of their genetic characteristics, a radiation oncologist told Europe's largest cancer congress, ECCO 15 - ESMO 34 [1], in Berlin. Professor Dirk de Ruysscher, from Maastricht University Medical Centre, Maastricht, The Netherlands, said that his team's work might provide the basis for personalised radiotherapy in which, with a simple blood test, doctors may be able to select the optimal radiation dose for a particular patient.

The team of scientists from The Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and Canada studied a group of patients with hypersensitivity to radiation therapy, drawn from the largest world-wide database available - the European Union-funded Genetic pathways for the prediction of the effect of irradiation (GENEPI) study, which integrates biological material with patient data and treatment specifications. The database included information from more than 8000 European patients.

“Part of this project is the establishment of a sub-database in which very rare patient characteristics are brought together with the hypothesis that their genetic traits will enable the characterisation of molecular pathways related to radio-sensitivity,” explained Professor de Ruysscher. “A major problem for radiation oncologists at present is that we are bound by the need to avoid damage to normal tissues. This means that the dose of radiation generally used is governed by the response of the most radiosensitive patients, and this may lead to many patients receiving lower than optimal doses, hence affecting the ability to deliver a higher dose that may result in better local tumour control.”

source: European CanCer Organization