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DESY News: Anna Grebinyk awarded for research into novel cancer therapy

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2023/03/09
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Anna Grebinyk awarded for research into novel cancer therapy

DESY postdoc receives research prize from TH Wildau

On 27 February, PITZ scientist Anna Grebinyk was awarded the 2023 Research Prize in the category “research-oriented achievements” by the Technical University of Applied Sciences in Wildau (TH Wildau). With the prize, which is being awarded in this form for the first time this year, the university honours her research project “FullDrug – New approaches in cancer therapy with C60 fullerene complexes”. The prize, which was presented during the 12th Wildau Science Week, recognises outstanding achievements by scientists at TH Wildau.

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Anna Grebinyk (left) and Dana Mietzner received the awards for research-oriented and transfer-oriented achievements, respectively, from Klaus-Martin Melzer, Vice President for Research and Transfer at TH Wildau. Photo: TH Wildau, Ulf Büschleb
In the FullDrug project, Grebinyk, who comes from Ukraine and who was employed at TH Wildau before joining PITZ, investigated the possibility of using carbon-60 particles, so-called fullerenes, for cancer treatment. C60 fullerenes are nanoparticles composed of sixty carbon atoms. They have the molecular structure of small football-shaped spheres that are composed of carbon rings. This gives fullerenes unique physicochemical properties and biological activities. Models have already shown that it should be possible to use these fullerenes to target and kill cancer cells. Grebinyk focused her project on the final phase of preclinical studies on this and proved that the concept works for this novel treatment strategy, which is called photodynamic chemotherapy. In particular, the extensive cooperation with six Ukrainian partner universities ensured that the scope of the project grew far beyond the original project plan. The number of cancer types that could be targeted by the tested drugs is very large; therefore, the proposed strategy to increase their therapeutic potential with photodynamic chemotherapy with fullerenes seems promising.

While the FullDrug project was underway, Grebinyk and the PITZ group also designed a project to explore another avenue for cancer treatment: FLASH radiotherapy. In less than a thousandth of a second, PITZ, the Photo Injector Test Stand in Zeuthen, can deliver the total radiation dose with which nowadays cancer patients in clinics are irradiated for about ten minutes. Due to the fact that, in contrast to conventional continuous irradiation, very short and intense radiation pulses are shot at the tumour during FLASH radiotherapy, the surrounding healthy tissues are significantly less affected, yet the tumour treatment efficiency is kept the same. In that way, the side effects of radiation are reduced and the effective dose for destroying radiation-resistant tumours could even be increased. Together with the PITZ team, Grebinyk wants to investigate what the ideal parameters are for using FLASH cancer radiotherapy as efficiently and considerately as possible on patients. Together with TH Wildau, the team is working to create the bridge between accelerator physics and biomedical research to make the investigations possible.

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