News • Cancer radiotherapy monitoring

Novel hydrogel turns pink to indicate radiation dose sweet spot

More than half of all cancer patients undergo radiation therapy and the dose is critical. Too much and the surrounding tissue gets damaged, too little and the cancer cells survive.

Image source: Unsplash/Paweł Czerwiński (colourisation: HiE)

Subhadeep Dutta and Karthik Pushpavanam, graduate students working in the lab of Kaushal Rege, Professor at Arizona State University in Tempe, and collaborators at Banner-M.D. Anderson in Gilbert, Arizona, developed a new way to monitor radiation doses that is cost-effective and easy to read. Dutta presented their research at the 64th Annual Meeting of the Biophysical Society in San Diego, California. 

Radiation therapy directs high energy beams to destroy the genetic material inside cells and prevent them from growing. Typically, a radiation therapy team decides the total dose of radiation, and then divides that total dose over several sessions. The machines and calculations involved are usually spot-on as far as dosages, but sometimes variations, perhaps due to patient movement such as breathing, or in rare instances due to issues with the machine or software, can be causes for error. Monitoring the dose is critical as both overdosing and underdosing can compromise patient safety—too much healthy tissue or too little tumor can be destroyed in the process.

Photo
Researchers have discovered a biocompatible cost-effective hydrogel that can be used to monitor therapeutic doses of ionizing radiation by becoming more pink with increasing radiation exposure. This picture shows a circle of hydrogel that was irradiated on the left half, which is slightly pink; whereas the right half of the gel is not irradiated and remains colorless.
Source: Biophysical Society

Dutta, Pushpavanam, Rege, and colleagues made a hydrogel that can be applied directly to a patient’s skin in order to easily measure radiation doses. Mixed into the hydrogel are gold salts and a few amino acids. Without radiation, the gel is colorless, but as it is exposed to radiation it becomes pink. The color intensity is directly correlated to the amount of radiation. At the end of a treatment, it is painlessly peeled off the skin and the color is measured with a common and relatively inexpensive lab instrument, an absorption spectrometer.

Some dose monitors are currently available for patients. “One looks like a sheet of paper (Radiochromic Films), but it is sensitive to light and heat, so it must be carefully handled, and requires long processing times. Another is a tiny sensor (NanoDot), which is expensive and requires multiple arrays to cover an area of the skin. Ours can be used directly onto the skin and is relatively inexpensive,” Dutta says.

The gel has performed well in testing and was recently used on canine cancer patients undergoing radiotherapy. “Our next plan is to convert it to an app-based system, where you can take a picture of a gel and that can predict the dose based on programming in the app. It’s just measuring color, which is easy to do,” says Dutta. The team is hopeful that future studies will lead to translation of this technology for use with human patients in the clinic.


Source: Biophysical Society

17.02.2020

Related articles

Photo

News • Quality Assurance

A unique environment for cancer patient QA in proton therapy

IBA (Ion Beam Applications S.A.) announces the launch of myQA iON at the 2019 PTCOG conference. myQA iON significantly reduces the time needed for patient QA: The use of PT machine log files, process…

Photo

Video • Fighting cancer

'Zapping' tumors might be the future of radiation therapy

New accelerator-based technology being developed by the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University aims to reduce the side effects of cancer radiation…

Photo

News • Radiation protection

Using skin creams during radiation therapy: Is it safe?

Nearly two-thirds of all cancer patients in the United States will undergo radiation therapy as part of their treatment, and as many as 90 percent of those patients will experience radiation…

Related products

Subscribe to Newsletter