Making radiation therapy more effective in the era of precision medicine

Abstract

Cancer has become a leading cause of death and constitutes an enormous burden worldwide. Radiation is a principle treatment modality used alone or in combination with other forms of therapy, with 50%–70% of cancer patients receiving radiotherapy at some point during their illness. It has been suggested that traditional radiotherapy (daily fractions of approximately 1.8–2 Gy over several weeks) might select for radioresistant tumor cell sub-populations, which, if not sterilized, give rise to local treatment failure and distant metastases. Thus, the challenge is to develop treatment strategies and schedules to eradicate the resistant subpopulation of tumorigenic cells rather than the predominant sensitive tumor cell population. With continued technological advances including enhanced conformal treatment technology, radiation oncologists can increasingly maximize the dose to tumors while sparing adjacent normal tissues, to limit toxicity and damage to the latter. Increased dose conformality also facilitates changes in treatment schedules, such as changes in dose per treatment fraction and number of treatment fractions, to enhance the therapeutic ratio. For example, the recently developed large dose per fraction treatment schedules (hypofractionation) have shown clinical advantage over conventional treatment schedules in some tumor types. Experimental studies suggest that following large acute doses of radiation, recurrent tumors, presumably sustained by the most resistant tumor cell populations, may in fact be equally or more radiation sensitive than the primary tumor. In this review, we summarize the related advances in radiotherapy, including the increasing understanding of the molecular mechanisms of radioresistance, and the targeting of these mechanisms with potent small molecule inhibitors, which may selectively sensitize tumor cells to radiation.

Insights on the Radiation-Induced Adaptive Response at the Cellular Level and Its Implications in Cancer Therapy

“…Hence, hyper-fractionation of RT can maximize the probability of resistance in normal cells by making cancer cells sensitive. Molecular mechanisms such as decreased ROS can lead to DNA damage, which increases the DNA repair capacity and thus leads to autophagy or other self-renewal mechanisms contributing to cellular resistance [63]. Hence, challenges remain to minimize or eradicate the resistant tumor sub-population more than the sensitive tumor sub-population.…”

Efficiency of moderately hypofractionated radiotherapy in NSCLC cell model

“…The failure of NormRT is associated with tumor heterogeneity and radiation-stimulated radio resistance. Accelerated dose per fraction protocols may open a therapeutic window for radiation dose optimization in NSCLC, since a small dose per fraction RT may select for radioresistant tumor cells, while hypofractionation may sensitize tumor cells to subsequent irradiation ( 8 ). Therefore, stereotactic ablative radiotherapy (SBRT) for small tumors with a few high dose fractions or moderate hypofractionated radiotherapy (HypoRT) for patients with locally advanced NSCLC, have recently gained clinical importance as alternative RT treatment ( 9 – 11 ).…”

3D-printed bolus ensures the precise postmastectomy chest wall radiation therapy for breast cancer

“…Previous studies have shown the mastectomy rates remaining between 30% and 40% (3). Post-mastectomy radiotherapy (PMRT) is associated with a better local control and overall survival benefit in patients with unfavorable pathologic features (4)(5)(6)(7)(8).…”