idw – Informationsdienst Wissenschaft
Nachrichten, Termine, Experten
Nachrichten, Termine, Experten
Professor Marco Durante, Head of the Biophysics Department at GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung and Professor at the Department of Physics at TU Darmstadt, Institute of Condensed Matter Physics, has been granted a prestigious European Union research funding award for established scientists: The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded him the renowned Advanced Grant.
The biophysicist will be able to use the millions in funding to realize an ambitious research project to improve tumor therapy. As lead scientist and together with his team he will conduct research into even more effective treatments for cancer and investigate a promising radiotherapy method that uses ultra-short pulses of heavy ion beams with ultra-high dose rates.
ERC Advanced Grants are awarded on the basis of the scientific excellence of the projects submitted and are aimed at established researchers from all disciplines whose highly innovative projects go considerably beyond the current state of the art and open up new areas of research. They are endowed with a maximum of 2.5 million euros each over a period of five years.
Professor Marco Durante is an internationally recognized expert in the fields of radiation biology and medical physics, especially for therapy with heavy ions and radioprotection in space. He made important scientific progress in the field of biodosimetry of charged particles, optimization of particle therapy, and shielding of heavy ions in space. This award means a renewed recognition for the biophysicist and a seamless follow-up to a previous award: Professor Marco Durante had already received an “ERC Advanced Grant” for his research project “BARB” in 2020. The latest experiments in this field, which focused primarily on improving the precision of tumor therapy, were recently completed and are now being published in impactful scientific journals. The experience gained at BARB is also highly relevant for his new ERC-funded project entitled “Heavy Ion FLASH (HI-FLASH)”.
In the HI-FLASH research project, Professor Marco Durante wants to use very heavy ions at ultra-high intensity against brain cancer. Patients are currently treated either with high-energy protons or carbon ions for many solid cancers, including brain malignancies. Nevertheless, the prognosis for glioblastoma (GBM) – an aggressive, fast-growing brain tumor in adults – is still dismal.
This is where the new project comes in. Ions heavier than those previously used could be highly beneficial in treating of extremely resistant, hypoxic and fatal tumors such as glioblastoma. Unfortunately, the use of very heavy ions is constrained by their excessive normal tissue toxicity. Professor Durante's approach is to enable very heavy ion therapy with acceptable toxicities by using the so-called FLASH effect. The focus on very short and high-intensity radiation pulses, where the treatment dose is delivered in sub-second timescales. The use of such particles with ultra-high dose rate (UHDR) may result in significantly sparing the normal tissues whilst maintaining tumor control.
„Although the molecular mechanism is still unclear, the FLASH effect considerably broadens the therapeutic window and has already proven to be very promising in radiotherapy. While my group at GSI/FAIR has pioneered the first demonstration of the FLASH effect with high-energy carbon ions, UHDR use of even heavier ions, 20Ne, could be very effective for very resistant tumor”, explains Marco Durante. This is exactly what HI-FLASH will be investigating over the next five years in order to exploit the full potential for the best possible patient care. The new research project will compare toxicity and tumor control with neon ions at conventional and ultra-high dose rates and, for comparison, with high-energy protons, which are poorly effective in treating GBM but are known to spare normal brain at UHDR.
The GSI accelerators on the campus in Darmstadt are perfectly suitable for this pioneering research. GSI/FAIR is the only facility world-wide where the FLASH effect can be explored with ions heavier than carbon. The GSI synchrotron can accelerate ions of all naturally occurring chemical elements to high energies and intensities, and the future FAIR accelerator center will significantly expand these possibilities. “If successful, HI-FLASH will pave the way for the use of heavy ions in cancer treatment, improving outcomes for patients with highly resistant and lethal tumors”, explains Marco Durante.
Professor Marco Durante said, “I would like to thank the European Research Council for giving me another great chance with their ERC Advanced Grant funding and enabling me to significantly advance our research in the field of tumor therapy with charged particles. I look forward to realizing HI-FLASH together with my team and the experts of the GSI Biophysics and Accelerator departments. The next five years offer an extraordinary opportunity to transfer basic research into concrete medical progress.”
Professor Thomas Nilsson, the Scientific Managing Director of GSI and FAIR, emphasized, “I am extremely pleased for Marco Durante and the recognition of his scientific work with this high-profile grant. Such successes also underline the excellent research quality at GSI/FAIR and demonstrate the unique opportunities and research perspectives offered by our exceptional infrastructures. The ERC grants are a clear sign of how forward-looking our research activities are.”
About Professor Marco Durante
Professor Marco Durante has over 30 years’ experience in heavy-ion biophysics. He studied physics and got his PhD at the University Federico II in Italy. His post doc positions took him to the NASA Johnson Space Center in Texas and to the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Japan. During his studies, he specialized in charged particle therapy, cosmic radiation, radiation cytogenetics and radiation biophysics. He has received numerous awards for his research, including the Galileo Galilei prize from the European Federation of Organizations for Medical Physics (EFOMP), the Warren Sinclair award of the US National Council of Radiation Protection (NCRP), the IBA-Europhysics Prize of the European Physical Society (EPS), the Bacq & Alexander award of the European Radiation Research Society (ERRS), the Failla Award of the Radiation Research Society, the Henry Kaplan Prize of the International Association of Radiation Research (IARR) and Ellen Gleditsch Prize of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters. Additionally, he is president of the Particle Therapy Co-Operative Group (PTCOG), the global organization of particle therapy centers. He has been in fact re-elected President of PTCOG for a second 3-years term during the recent annual meeting in Buenos Aires. Now he has received a second subsequent ERC Advanced Grant for his research after 2020.
https://www.gsi.de/en/work/research/biophysics
Professor Marco Durante has been awarded the Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) ...
Source: G. Otto, GSI/FAIR
Setup for a FLASH experiment at GSI/FAIR.
Source: Biophysiks Department, GSI/FAIR
Criteria of this press release:
Journalists
Biology, Medicine, Physics / astronomy
transregional, national
Contests / awards, Research projects
English
Professor Marco Durante has been awarded the Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) ...
Source: G. Otto, GSI/FAIR
Setup for a FLASH experiment at GSI/FAIR.
Source: Biophysiks Department, GSI/FAIR
You can combine search terms with and, or and/or not, e.g. Philo not logy.
You can use brackets to separate combinations from each other, e.g. (Philo not logy) or (Psycho and logy).
Coherent groups of words will be located as complete phrases if you put them into quotation marks, e.g. “Federal Republic of Germany”.
You can also use the advanced search without entering search terms. It will then follow the criteria you have selected (e.g. country or subject area).
If you have not selected any criteria in a given category, the entire category will be searched (e.g. all subject areas or all countries).
