Vibrational Spectroscopy in Radiobiology

Dear Colleagues,

Radiation therapy represents a fundamental tool in cancer treatment. Cancer resilience and (hyper)sensitivity of normal tissue to ionizing radiation can cause control failure and complicate personalized dose prescriptions. Improvements in RT strategies can be attained by considering the substantial differences in radiosensitivity shown by tumor and healthy cells among patients. The ability to customize therapies requires fast and precise predictions of the cellular radioresponse. For this purpose, extensive efforts are continuously being made, but none of the examined predictive assays have been found to be suitable for routine clinical implementation. In addition, many biochemical assays adopted for detecting radiation’s effects on cellular components can induce changes in the biological samples, altering their structure due to the required chemical substances and elaborated preparation procedures. Therefore, the use of new, non-invasive, and fast optical methods able to examine radiation response in vitro or in vivo across a wide variety of samples, even giving information at the level of biomolecules, can represent an extremely useful tool. Vibrational techniques such as Raman and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy can rapidly and non-invasively investigate biochemical components of cells and tissues with minimal sample preparation. These techniques can allow the analysis of complex biological processes, such as proliferation and cell death processes, attracting a growing interest in the field of radiation-induced cyto- and genotoxicity.

Dr. Maria Lepore
Dr. Ines Delfino
Dr. Roberta Meschini
Guest Editors

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• FT-IR and O-PTIR spectroscopy
• Raman spectroscopy
• SERS
• TERS
• ionizing radiation
• vibrational imaging
• vibrational histopathology
• cell death and proliferation
• cyto- and genotoxicity