He adds that the next step for the team is to develop their X-ray tube system to irradiate normal and cancerous skin cells created with 3D printing methods. “Later this spring, we’ll use the X-ray tube system to investigate normal and cancer-cell spheroid response to ultrahigh dose rates and conventional irradiations — in each case, with and without gold nanoparticles as radiosensitizers."

Additionally, the team is building a FLASH irradiation station on the ARIEL beamline at TRIUMF, the high-energy physics lab in Vancouver. They have already made an electron-to-photon converter to deliver radiation at an ultrahigh dose-rate of 10MV on ARIEL’s medium-energy beam dump and will be evaluating the capability of the photon beam in experiments that will apply FLASH to healthy lung tissue in mice. The dose rates should be up to 200 Gy/s and above the FLASH effect dose-rate threshold of 40 Gy/s to depths of 10 cm, according to Bazalova-Carter.

“We’ll use the Medscint plastic scintillators for in vivo dosimetry at TRIUMF, while evaluating scintillator response in the MV regime – something we haven’t done as of yet," she said. "We’re also keen to work with the Medscint team to push the temporal resolution of the detectors further, down beyond the 1 ms exposure time into the microsecond regime.”

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