12 Mars – Thesis defene - Mario Enrique Alcocer Avila
14 h Amphi A - Building A29 (Talence campus)
Monte Carlo modeling of targeted radionuclide therapy of micrometastases.
Targeted radionuclide therapy (TRT) is a cancer treatment modality in which radioactive isotopes are coupled to tumor-specific carrier molecules for the selective irradiation of tumor cells. The aim of this thesis is to provide an accurate description of the pattern of energy deposit by some of the most promising Auger electron- and alpha particle-emitting radionuclides currently considered for TRT, by means of accurate Monte Carlo track structure (MCTS) simulations. As part of this doctoral work, the TILDA-V code was extended and improved to include the full slowing-down of alpha particles in water. Radiation transport and dosimetry studies were performed to validate as a whole the capabilities of the latest version of TILDA-V for simulating the interactions of protons, alpha particles and electrons with biological matter. The code was extensively benchmarked against other numerical tools and available experimental data with satisfactory results. The effect on the simulations of changing the description of the biological medium (water versus DNA) was analyzed in detail as well. Furthermore, the various radionuclides of interest were evaluated by computing the absorbed dose to isolated tumor cells and to a small cell cluster representing a micrometastasis.
The results of the present work will be valuable to the community of nuclear medicine to understand the relative merits of various radionuclides and to guide the choice of the most adapted radionuclide to arm a targeting molecule, taking into account the clinical setting in oncology.
