'Nature Physics' features article on first successful treatment of a tumor by radioactive ion beams

First successful treatment of a tumor by radioactive ion beams was demonstrated within the ERC-funded project BARB - Biomedical Applications of Radioactive ion Beams - headed by Prof. Marco Durante at GSI (Darmstadt) together with an LMU team led by Katia Parodi as associated partner. The results were now reported in "Nature Physics". The LMU team contributed a high-resolution and high-sensitivity in-beam small-animal Positron-Emission-Tomography (PET) scanner that allows the precise localization of the ion beam in the irradiated body. The international and interdisciplinary team of Katia Parodi originally developed the detector together with the laboratory of Prof. Taiga Yamaya (QST-Chiba) in the context of Prof. Parodi's ERC Consolidator Grant „SIRMIO – Small animal proton irradiator for research in molecular image-guided radiation-oncology“ to monitor the radiation induced activity of proton beams and was further developed for the BARB project to monitor radiactive ion beam treatments in real-time.

The photograph shows members of the LMU team involved in the BARB experiments at GSI together with the SIRMIO small-animal PET scanner (from left to right: Peter Thirolf, Giulio Lovatti, Angelica Noto, Francesco Evangelista, Munetaka Nitta, Katia Parodi).

The LMU press release on the publication can be found at:

https://www.lmu.de/de/newsroom/newsuebersicht/news/neue-wege-fuer-die-krebstherapie-erste-tumorbehandlung-mit-radioaktiven-ionenstrahlen.html       (you need to open this link in a separate window)

the original publication:

Daria Boscolo, Giulio Lovatti, Olga Sokol et al.: Image-guided treatment of mouse tumours with radioactive ion beams. Nature Physics 2025

can be found at: 

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-025-02993-8  (you need to open this link in a separate window)