Advances in The Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation

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Background

Ionizing radiation is a double-edged sword. If applied appropriately, it can destroy the malignancy and cure cancer patients; however, it can also cause temporary or permanent adverse effects to normal tissues and organs. With advancements in technology and medicine that allow for higher rates of disease cure, many cancer survivors must live with life-long side effects from their cancer therapies, including toxicities from radiation. The most serious side effects can even cause the death of patients. Therefore, continued investigation towards minimizing radiation-induced toxicities while maintaining tumor control is a currently unmet clinical need.

However, the definition of the therapeutic index of radiation therapy cannot be achieved through a single-variable and monotonical function of physical (absorbed) dose. The biological dose, which is the product of physical dose and relative biological effectiveness (RBE), has been adopted to evaluate the radiobiological effects. Numerous physical and biological factors, such as the dose rate, dose fractionation, beam quality, cell type, and biological endpoint, can influence biological effects and thus clinical outcomes. Notably, radiosensitivity of tumors and normal tissues are intrinsically heterogenous, wherein some sites are radioresistant while others are sensitive. The radiosensitivity also depends on a variety of factors such as tissue oxygen concentration, and radiation beam quality. The discrepancies in radiosensitivity have increased the complexity and workload in designing and implementing effective treatment plans for many disease sites. Even for the same disease, the clinical outcomes vary among patients due to individual differences in response to radiation.

Although the understanding of the underlying mechanisms of radiation-induced biological effects has been greatly improved over years, the unknown remains. The aim of the present Research Topic is to provide an up-to-date overview of innovations and recent developments in experimental techniques, computational methods, biological effects modeling, and novel data analysis tools in radiobiology studies. The potential topics of interest include but are not limited to the following:
(1) Cellular and molecular responses, such as mechanisms of DNA damage repair.
(2) Tumor and normal tissue responses as they relate to different radiation modalities.
(3) Biophysical modeling, such as RBE models for charged particle therapy, and normal tissue complication probability (NTCP) models.
(4) Radiosensitivity-dependent biological dose optimization in treatment plans, i.e., using organ or tissues specific α and β parameters in the computation.
(5) Radiomics and radio-genomics.
(6) Biochemical and biophysical mechanisms of novel treatment modalities such as ultra-high dose rate FLASH therapy, and boron neutron capture therapy (BNCT).
(7) Biophysical principles of radiation-induced immune suppression and stimulation and radioimmunotherapy.

Please note: manuscripts consisting solely of bioinformatics or computational analysis of public genomic or transcriptomic databases which are not accompanied by validation (independent cohort or biological validation in vitro or in vivo) are out of scope for this section and will not be accepted as part of this Research Topic.

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