Departments

Translational Radiooncology and Clinical Radiotherapy, Professor Mechthild Krause

• Research into combination therapies, e.g. radiotherapy and targeted drugs (pre-clinical and clinical) as well as external radiation and internal treatment with radioactive-labeled medication (together with the Institute of Radiopharmaceutical Cancer Research)
• Research into biomarkers with the help of which it is possible to predict the success of radiation treatment and tailor the therapy to the individual patient
• Comparative studies of the effectiveness of classic radiotherapy using photons with proton therapy
• In-vivo experiments on combined therapies and biological personalization using innovative imaging methods
• Development of statistical models to predict the success of radiation therapy

Figure: Comparison of proton therapy with classic radiotherapy using ultra hard x-ray beams (photons); comparably good irradiation of the brain tumor (red and yellow areas), less impact on the surrounding healthy tissue with proton therapy @Baumann et al., Nature Review Cancer 16:234, 2016

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Radiobiology, Professor Nils Cordes

• Investigation of target molecules that are responsible for radioresistance in tumor cells and development of strategies to inhibit these molecules
• Research into biomarkers for cancer stem cells to predict the success of radiotherapy and be able to offer patients personalized therapy
• Investigation of the micro environment in tumor tissue as well as potential regulatory intervention to reduce resistance to therapies

Figure: Left: Survival of tumor cells in 3D matrix after combined treatment with radiation and molecular drugs. Right: immunofluorescence of integrins in tumor cells; transcriptome and proteome analyses in tumor cells after treatment.

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Medical Radiation Physics, Professor Christian Richter

• Technological optimization of proton therapy, including laser-accelerated particle therapy together with the Institute of Radiatio Physics (division of Laser Particle Acceleration), and the use of modern imaging techniques for therapy planning and monitoring
• Modelling of treatment effects for the personalized selection of patients for particle therapy and differing beam quality
• Precision measurement of the proton beam range in a patient during treatment
• Image-guided, high-precision radiation technology for experimental radiotherapy using a small animal model

Figure: Initial measurement of the proton beam range with a prompt gamma camera during patient treatment. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167814016000074

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Image Guided High Precision Radiotherapy, Professor Esther Troost

• Investigation of three- and four-dimensional imaging techniques for high-precision radiotherapy in moving tumors
• Research into methods of compensating movement in moving tumors (radiation while holding breath, use of an abdominal corset)
• Development of methods to predict the occurrence and extent of the finest tumor extensions and research into new dosage strategies based on these methods
• Use of MRI for the objective representation of normal tissue damage

Combined PET-MRI full-body scanner at Carl Gustav Carus University Hospital Dresden: Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) are two different imaging techniques which allow anatomical, structural and metabolic changes in the tissue under observation to be visualized. @NCT Dresden/Philip Benjamin