Post-doctoral fellow (2-year contract) (# of pos: 5)

Proton therapy (PT) is a therapeutic modality for treating cancer, with a specific capacity to deliver radiation dose into the tumor while maximally sparing surrounding healthy organs, therefore leading to a better quality of treatments, a reduction of the side effects and globally an enhanced quality of life for the patients. While radiotherapy (RT) is involved today in about 50% of cancer treatments, less than 1% of these treatments are delivered through PT. Although it offers clinical advantages through superior dose distribution, reducing the risk of normal tissue damage and increasing the chances of cure thanks to dose escalation, PT is a costly new technology that comes with a high initial capital cost and operating expense. Today, PT is considered 5 times more expensive than conventional RT. Flash and Grid therapy may help to reduce, if not erase, the cost difference between PT and conventional RT. In addition to enhance cancer cell killing PT may also tune tumor microenvironment, for example by reprogramming tumor-associated macrophages.

Flash therapy is based on the delivery of ultra-high dose rates requiring beam intensities that are several orders of magnitude higher than in conventional treatments. Grid therapy, on the other hand, consists in splitting the original clinical beam (photon or proton), using an engineered device or a devised method, to a set of smaller beams (“Beamlets”) equally spaced by a couple of mm. Both aim at sparing the upstream healthy tissues and open the doors towards hypofractionation. By adding Grid and Flash therapy to the current treatment modalities, Proton Therapy treatment room owners could treat up to 3000 patients year, 7 times more than with conventional radiation therapy machines (LINACS). This would result in making PT more affordable than RT while improving the treatment quality as sparing healthy tissues is further enhanced.

In this context, one position is available at Namur Research Institute for Life Sciences (NARILIS, LARN-URBC, UNamur) to work on proton irradiation as well as FLASH and GRID irradiations in close collaborations with IBA (worldwide leader in proton therapy technology, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium). Since 15 years, the NARILIS Radiobiology Team develops research projects focussed on the improvement of radiotherapeutic processes. The laboratory has a 2MV particle accelerator and a 225 kV X-ray irradiator as well as a full access to the NARILIS Institute's molecular and cellular biology laboratories.

For this job position, we are looking for highly motivated researchers who can work in transdisciplinary team composed of biologists, physicists, chemists and engineers. These works are funded by the Walloon Region and have the potential to revolutionise the fight against cancer using radiotherapy.