General ILL seminar
organised by College 3
Tuesday, 11 June 2025 at 10h30
Seminar room 101, ILL 50, 1st floor
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“Boron Neutron Capture Therapy: A new prospect for the treatment of cancers with poor-prognosis”
Ignacio Porras Professor at the Universidad de Granada, Spain Vice-President of the International Society for Neutron Capture Therapy (ISNCT)
There are still some cancers for which current therapeutic options are not effective. These are diffuse cancers difficult to target even by the most precise radiotherapy techniques, like proton or carbon ion therapies, or local recurrences of a cancer previously treated with radiation therapy. In these cases, where vital organs should be overexposed in order to achive a total tumor control, current radiotherapies are quite compromised. Boron Neutron Capture Therapy (BNCT) is a very promising form of radiotherapy for these patients, because of its selectivity at cellular level. This is due to the reaction of thermal neutrons with 10B atoms which are selectively delivered to the tumor cells, by means of an appropriate non-toxic compound. BNCT is in a expanding phase, with the recent development of in-hospital facilites worldwide based on compact accelerators. However for the optimal application of BNCT and its expanson to a wider class of cancers, strong research is required. One of the most suitable places where preclinical research can be done is ILL. Our group has been actively doing research at ILL towards reducing uncertainties in the BNCT treatment planning, testing new boron compounds and exploring its application to challenging cancers for which there is no cure as pediatric DIPG.
In this talk, after an introduction of the sound principles of BNCT, updated results of its clinical trials will be shown. Then the current progress in the new facilities will be described, and finally open research problems, including those studied in ILL will be discussed.
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Hanno Filter (College 3 Secretary)
External visitors may ask for a site access to tellier(at)ill.fr