A: Accelerated proton beams have become increasingly common for treating cancer. The need for cost and size reduction of particle accelerating machines has led to the pioneering investigation of optical ion acceleration techniques based on laser-plasma interactions as a possible alternative. Laser-matter interaction can produce extremely pulsed particle bursts of ultra-high dose rates (≥ 10 9 Gy/s), largely exceeding those currently used in conventional proton therapy. Since biological effects of ionizing radiation are strongly affected by the spatio-temporal distribution of DNA-damaging events, the unprecedented physical features of such beams may modify cellular and tissue radiosensitivity to unexplored extents. Hence, clinical applications of laser-generated particles need thorough assessment of their radiobiological effectiveness. To date, the majority of studies have either used rodent cell lines or have focussed on cancer cell killing being local tumour control the main objective of radiotherapy. Conversely, very little data exist on sub-lethal cellular effects, of relevance to normal tissue integrity and secondary cancers, such as premature cellular senescence. Here, we discuss ultra-high dose rate radiobiology and present preliminary 1Corresponding author.

This is the author's final version of the contribution published as: a b s t r a c t A growing interest of the scientific community towards multidisciplinary applications of laser-driven beams has led to the development of several projects aiming to demonstrate the possible use of these beams for therapeutic purposes. Nevertheless, laser-accelerated particles differ from the conventional beams typically used for multiscipilinary and medical applications, due to the wide energy spread, the angular divergence and the extremely intense pulses. The peculiarities of optically accelerated beams led to develop new strategies and advanced techniques for transport, diagnostics and dosimetry of the accelerated particles. In this framework, the realization of the ELIMED (ELI-Beamlines MEDical and multidisciplinary applications) beamline, developed by INFN-LNS (Catania, Italy) and that will be installed in 2017 as a part of the ELIMAIA beamline at the ELI-Beamlines (Extreme Light Infrastructure Beamlines) facility in Prague, has the aim to investigate the feasibility of using laser-driven ion beams for multidisciplinary applications. In this contribution, an overview of the beamline along with a detailed description of the main transport elements as well as the detectors composing the final section of the beamline will be presented.

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