Chiara De Lucia

The project aims at investigating the benefits of proton therapy using radiation doses delivered in short pulses at ultra-high dose rate and to investigate the biological response of normal and cancer cells in vitro, determining whether the healthy cells are in fact more efficient than the malignant cells in repairing the FLASH-rate proton-induced damage. The project will design targeted radiobiological experiments to quantify the radiation response of high-dose rate proton beams as a function of depth and oxygen level and it will also use radiobiological models to investigate the mechanisms underpinning the differential responses and develop methods of accounting for FLASH effects in cancer treatment planning.