Events
O xoves 24 de abril de 2025, Prof. Yolanda Prezado Alonso (Profesora de investigación Oportunius, Centro para la investigación en Medicina Molecular y enfermedades crónicas, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela) ofrecerá o seminario “Winds of change in radiation therapy: how the dose delivery method modulates the biological response" dentro do ciclo CINBIO Seminar Programme.
Será ás 11:00 horas na Sala de audiovisuais do CINBIO.
ABSTRACT:
Today, technological advances in radiation delivery, including image guidance and particle-beam therapy (i.e. proton and ion-beam therapy), have notably improved the conformation of the dose to the tumor, thereby reducing dose to organs-at-risk. However, the treatment of some radioresistant tumors, tumors close or surrounded by a sensitive organ (i.e. spinal cord) and paediatric cancers, is still compromised by the radiation tolerance of normal tissue. Radiation therapy (RT) delivered with external sources has to date been restricted to the same few beam characteristics: the same few temporal schemes, low dose rates, beam-particle type (photons are used in 90% of treatments) and spatial distributions (predominantly large beams of several square centimetres leading to homogenous dose distributions). Crucially, by exploiting the close bond between physics and biology in RT, different biological effects can be activated and/or modulated by tuning the physical parameters of irradiation [1]. Some examples are minibeam radiation therapy [1], FLASH therapy [2], PULSAR [3] among others. These techniques have already shown a significant increase of the therapeutic index for several radioresistant tumors, such as high-grade gliomas. These new RT approaches activate different signaling pathways resulting in a distinct biological response of both normal and tumoral tissues to radiation. In particular, some of these techniques elicit an effective anti-tumor response and offer promise for radio-immunotherapy combinations. This lecture will provide an overview of this innovative radiotherapies. Their distinct radiobiology will be described, and current knowledge gaps discussed. The exploration of the vast ‘terra incognita’ of the mechanisms by which the biological response to ionising radiation is modulated by the physical characteristics of the beam requires the contribution of numerous researchers with different competences. This presentation aims to contribute to awakening the interest of the Galician community to work in the field of RT.
1. Prezado, Y., Divide and conquer: spatially fractionated radiation therapy. Expert Reviews in Molecular Medicine, 2022. 24: p. 12.
2. Favaudon, V., et al., Ultrahigh dose-rate FLASH irradiation increases the differential response between normal and tumor tissue in mice. Sci Transl Med, 2014. 6(245): p. 245ra93.
3. Moore, C., et al., Personalized Ultrafractionated Stereotactic Adaptive Radiotherapy (PULSAR) in Preclinical Models Enhances Single-Agent Immune Checkpoint Blockade. Int J Radiat Oncol Biol Phys, 2021. 110(5): p. 1306-1316.
BIO:
Since February 2024, distinguished researcher Oportunius, CiMUS. ERC consolidator grantee. Previously, senior group leader at Institut Curie (translational radiobiology), research director at CNRS and board-certified clinical medical physicist. Since 2011, a permanent scientist at the CNRS. Leader of the "New Approaches in Radiotherapy" team since 2013. Prize M and Mime Peyre of the French Academy of Science (2021) for her work in proton therapy.
She has a multidisciplinary profile (medical physics, radiobiology).
She has acted as the Chair of the scientific committee of the European Federation of Medical Physicist (integrating more than 8000 physicists in Europe), vice-chair of the international biophysics’ collaboration, chair of numerous working groups and committees. She is regularly invited to evaluation panels such as FWO or HCERES (French organism evaluating the activity of the labs) and as member of the scientific committee of the main congresses in her domain. She is frequently requested as an evaluator in prestigious calls, such as ERC, H2020 and others. She was chosen as the president of the 2024 European Congress of Medical Physics.
She has directed 9 PhD theses and supervised the work of more than 10 postdocs. She has attracted more than 5 million Euros in the last 5 years. She has several collaborations with the main companies in the radiotherapy sector and several industrial grants. She has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers, most of them as first or last author, and 12 invited review papers in prestigious journals of her domain. She is internationally recognized as a world leader in innovative radiotherapy techniques. She has participated in numerous conferences (> 100), many as an invited keynote and plenary speaker (>50).
