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Podcast: The Future of Everything
Episode: Billy Loo: “FLASH” radiation therapy brings hope to cancer patients
Description: Stanford radiation oncologist, Billy Loo, says that a new generation of radiation therapy technology called PHASER will be so fast that it can even compensate for the patient moving during treatment.
High-energy X-rays will be fired so quickly, like a flash photograph, that motion is frozen and radiation can be more precisely focused on tumors. His research team is also finding that such ultra-fast “FLASH” radiation kills cancer cells through new biological mechanisms while causing less damage to healthy tissues.
Loo says that while radiation benefits two-thirds of U.S. patients, half of patients with canc...