Microbeam radiation therapy doses the area with thin parallel planes of radiation, up to a few hundred microns in width, creating a striped pattern of irradiation across the tumor. Microbeam radiation therapy (MRT) provides tremendous promise for cancer patients through its ability to destroy tumor cells while protecting surrounding healthy tissue. Yet research into its clinical use has been limited by the sheer size of the technology required to generate the beams. Until now, administering MRT required massive electron accelerators known as synchrotrons. But with a new microbeam emitter developed at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the technology has been scaled down, opening the doors for clinical research.   In a study published online by Applied Physics Letters, a multidisciplinary team led by Physics Professor Otto Zhou, PhD; Radiation Oncology Associate Professor X. Sha Chang, PhD; and Physics Professor Jianping Lu, PhD, built a device using carbon nanotube-based x-ray source array technology developed at UNC that can generate microbeam radiation with similar characteristics as the beams generated by synchrotron radiation. Researchers from Applied Sciences and Radiology at UNC also participated in this study. Zhou, a member of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, points to several studies that have shown that microbeam

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