Joint Institute for Nuclear Research
10.03.2022

Congratulations to Sergey Nikolaevich Dolya and Victor Ivanovich Smirnov on Receiving a Patent for Invention!

The JINR Department of Licenses and Intellectual Property announces that on 3 February 2022, the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research received a patent for the invention “Method for changing the final energy of a proton beam used for FLASH radiotherapy”. The authors are Sergey Nikolaevich Dolya and Viktor Ivanovich Smirnov. We congratulate our colleagues on being granted the patent!

A senior researcher of the DLNP Experimental Department of New Accelerators Sergey Nikolaevich Dolya is talking about the new patent | Video by Anastasia Malyshkina

The invention refers to accelerating equipment, namely to devices for measuring the final beam energy and also to particle irradiation therapy.

FLASH therapy is a method for radiotherapy implying ultrafast dose delivery with the dose rate several orders of magnitude higher than that used in contemporary clinical practice. Nowadays, the proton FLASH therapy is the focus of attention of scientists from many scientific centres. This technology is expected to allow a substantial increase in the quality of radiation treatment of malignant tumours due to the dominance of destruction of tumour cells compared to normal cells.

This assumption rests upon the fact that the radiation treatment efficacy depends both on the magnitude of the absorbed dose and on the dose rate. Less than a year ago, a term FLASH therapy appeared in the field of radiation treatment of cancer. Malignant neoplasms are irradiated using a powerful and short ionizing radiation pulse. At present, this technology is being probed at many scientific centres. The first results are impressive: during this therapy cancer cells die three times more intensively than normal ones. With FLASH therapy which can be completed just by one powerful proton pulse, patients will have the opportunity to avoid daily radiation treatment during 3 to 4 weeks and to be irradiated only once, which is really convenient.

Subject of Invention

The method for changing the final energy of a proton beam in FLASH therapy using a wedge absorber. Its specific feature is that the proton beam is put into the orbit parallel to the primary beam orbit using the first pair of deflecting magnets with the deflection magnitude linearly depended on the field amplitude in the magnets. Afterwards, the beam goes through the wedge absorber, losing a preset part of its energy, and is sent back to the original trajectory using the second pair of magnets.

For more details: https://new.fips.ru/registers-doc-view/fips_servlet?DB=RUPAT&DocNumber=2765830&TypeFile=html