Prediction of clinical radiosensitivity caused by ionising radiation during radiotherapy.

大约百分之一到五的癌症患者在放射治疗期间暴露于电离辐射的正常组织中遭受显著的副作用。虽然放射治疗是癌症治疗的有效疗法，但放射量通常受到限制，以尽量减少这些严重副作用（放射敏感性）的发生率。这意味着没有辐射敏感性的人没有得到最有益的辐射剂量。放射生物学研究的一个主要目标是开发有效的预测措施，可以在治疗前识别辐射敏感的个体。这种预测能力将使放射治疗辐射剂量的个体化，这将导致肿瘤控制率的提高和与放射治疗相关的副作用的发生率的降低。我们的目标是利用强大的微阵列技术在分子水平上了解辐射敏感性。使用微阵列技术，可以同时测试数千个基因的表达活性。我们有一个独特的组织库，从许多放射敏感和非敏感的对照放疗患者建立。使用微阵列技术从这个独特的组织库的样本，可以使基因表达模式的个人显示辐射敏感性，以区别于其余的人口。同时，将使用两项额外的测试来确定谁对辐射敏感性反应敏感，其中包括DNA修复途径的评估和端粒长度的评估（染色体末端的帽），这两项都已被证明与辐射敏感性有关。该实验有望开发出一种用于癌症患者接受放射治疗前临床的预测性测定方法。

Around one to five percent of cancer patients suffer from significant side effects in normal tissue exposed to ionizing radiation during radiotherapy. Although radiotherapy is an effective therapy for cancer treatment, the amount of radiation is generally restricted to minimize the incidence of these severe side effects (radiosensitivity). This means that individuals who don't have radiosensitivity are not getting the dose of radiation that would be most beneficial. A major goal of radiation biology research is to develop efficient predictive measures that could identify radiosensitive individuals prior to treatment. This predictive ability would enable the individualisation of radiotherapy radiation doses, which should result in improvement of tumour control rates and a reduction in the incidence of side effects associated with radiotherapy. We aim to understand radiosensitivity at the molecular level using the powerful technology of microarrays. Using microarray technology, thousands of genes can be tested for expression activity simultaneously. We have a unique tissue bank established from many radiosensitive and non-sensitive control radiotherapy patients. The use of microarray technology on samples from this unique tissue bank may enable the gene expression pattern of individuals that display radiosensitivity to be distinguished from the rest of the population. In conjunction, two additional tests will be used to determine who is susceptible to radiosensitive reactions which include assessment of a DNA repair pathway and assessment of the length of the telomeres (Caps on the ends of the chromosomes), both of which have been shown to be involved with radiosensitivy. This experimentation will hopefully lead to the development of a predictive assay for use in the clinic for cancer patients prior to receiving radiotherapy.