Abstract Body

FLASH radiotherapy has an important potential to improve patient’s treatment by limiting the development of side-effects while maintaining a similar anti-tumoral efficacy. In comparison to conventional radiotherapy, the FLASH effect has been demonstrated in vivo in different healthy organs (e.g. brain, lung, gut, skin). Most of these in vivo studies spread classically over several weeks and months to observe the FLASH effect and require ethical authorization for animal experiments. These limiting factors slow down FLASH investigations and prevent any in vivo validation of new FLASH beams in radiation facilities that does not allow animal studies. To circumvent these issues, some groups have developed new models for FLASH studies that allow a rapid detection of the FLASH effect. In my presentation, I will briefly review some of these recently published models as well as present some in vitro and ex vivo models we developed in the team. These models open new possibilities for FLASH research and will allow to investigate specific questions of great interest for the community, such as the importance of beam parameters or the determination of early molecular events occurring after FLASH radiotherapy.

Acknowledgements: Part of the work that will be presented have received funding from Varian, a Siemens Healthineers company