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Description
Along with surgery and chemotherapy, radiotherapy (RT) is one of the most important methods for
cancer treatment. At least 70 percent of all cancer patients will receive radiotherapy at some stage
during the course of their illness. In this context, any small improvement of any RT treatment will have
an important societal impact. It is well know that for a given radiation dose, the clinical (biological)
outcome depends on the physical parameters of the irradiation (beam type, dose distributions, etc.).
Bearing this in mind, two different strategies can be used in order to enhance the therapeutic index of
RT. The first one is to employ new dose delivery methods to shift the normal tissue tolerances towards
higher doses. This is the case of spatially fractionated techniques, like minibeam radiation therapy or
grid therapy. The second avenue consists in making each interaction radiation-tumor to be more
effective. This could be achieved either by increasing the tumor radiosensibility or by enhancing the
dose deposition, for instance, by using nanoparticles. These two strategies are applied by the new
radiotherapy approaches that will be described in this seminar. These innovative techniques have
already shown promising results in the treatment of radioresistant tumors, as well as, the sparing of
healthy tissues, specially important in pediatrics oncology.
