Radiation Therapy (RT): What is it really?

As the amount of work in the lab dies down and the senior project comes to an end, I realize that I have never truly explained (at least in one post) the background of what I am doing and what I am truly doing. Since my posts have been mostly about my experience and day to day in the lab I am changing it up. These next few posts will be information on what I am doing and the results of what I have done.

To start off, a little background.

Radiation therapy. What is it?

Radiation therapy(RT) utilizes high doses of radiation to kill cancer cells and prevent them from spreading. It may be external or internal. External radiation is delivered through a linear accelerator while internal radiation is delivered from a radioactive substance a physician places in your body. This study focus on external radiation.

RT is extremely important to the treatment of cancer prostate patients (really all cancer patients, but since this study is on prostate cancer let's focus on that). 40-60% of prostate cancer patients receive RT as a treatment.

Conventional radiation is delivered in fractions of 1.8-2Gy per fraction. Patients will receive 35-40 fractions in total.

Recently, improvements in radiators and technology used in radiation therapy has allowed for the advent of hypofractionation such as stereotactic RT. This allows for higher doses and fewer fractions, meaning a patient will receive a dose of 7-10Gy per fraction and a total of only 5 fractions.

You might be wondering whether there really is a difference between these two therapies.

Well, there have been several clinical studies to evaluate the difference between the conventional and hypofractionated regimen on patients' outcomes. This includes things such as tumor resistance and overall survival.

Even though, the cellular responses have not been investigated and are still unknown.

This is where we come in. We meaning University of Arizona and me (for three months at least).