Pioneering safer radiotherapy for children with cancer

Research area: Stem Cell Medicine > Neuro-oncology

Using technology to study the harmful side effects of radiotherapy and advance cancer care for children

This research is seeking funding.

The challenge: Making radiotherapy safer for children

Radiotherapy is a vital and often life-saving treatment for childhood cancer, with around 1 in 3 children receiving it as part of their care. While highly effective at slowing or stopping cancer growth, radiation can also damage healthy tissue surrounding the tumour.

This unintended impact can lead to serious and sometimes permanent side effects. In fact, survivours of childhood cancer who have undergone radiotherapy are up to 20 times more likely to develop a second cancer later in life.

There is an urgent need for research that improves our understanding of radiotherapy side effects and identifies ways to better protect children, both during treatment and throughout survivorship.

About the study: Advancing radiotherapy research in the lab

This project uses a highly advanced laboratory irradiator to safely and precisely model radiotherapy in a controlled research environment. This technology allows researchers to expose cancer cells, normal tissues, and blood and marrow samples to carefully measured doses of radiation.

By recreating how radiotherapy works in the body, we can:

Study how radiation kills cancer cells
Identify ways to improve the effectiveness of radiotherapy
Understand how and why healthy cells are damaged
Develop strategies to reduce off-target effects and long-term harm.
Innovative models to improve cancer treatment outcomes

Using patient-derived cancer cells and advanced stem cell-derived organoid models, our team can closely replicate how tumours and healthy tissues respond to treatment.

This approach allows us to:

Test different radiation doses and treatment schedules
Explore how tumours respond under varying conditions
Investigate combination therapies, including drugs that may enhance radiotherapy effectiveness
Identify treatments that protect healthy cells from damage.

By modelling real patient biology, we can generate more accurate, clinically relevant insights to guide safer cancer treatment.

Towards safer, more effective childhood cancer therapies

This research is a critical step toward improving outcomes for children with cancer. By better understanding the balance between treatment effectiveness and long-term risk, we aim to make radiotherapy both safer and more precise.

The addition of a laboratory irradiator strengthens our ability to deliver world-class childhood cancer research, supporting the development of next-generation therapies that reduce harm while maintaining life-saving benefits.

Why this research matters

By leveraging MCRI’s world-leading expertise in stem cell modelling and access to rare childhood tumour samples, this project will deliver urgently needed evidence to: