Robotic surgery in Hirschsprung disease: a unicentric experience on 31 procedures.

Robotic surgery has been increasingly applied to Hirschsprung patients with encouraging results. We report the results of a 5 year unicentric experience. All consecutive HSCR patients older than 12 months who underwent a surgical procedure with robotic approach between September 2017 and August 2022 were prospectively included.

Short and long-term exposure of CNS cell lines to BPA-f a radiosensitizer for boron neutron capture therapy: safety dose evaluation by a battery of cytotoxicity tests.

Despite the current clinical use of boronophenylalanine-fructose (BPA-f), as radiosensitizer, in BNCT application for brain tumors, still remains to be determined the safety dose of this agent. We evaluated the potential risk of primary BPA-f toxicity before neutronic irradiation at different concentrations (0-100μgBeq/ml) after short- and long-term exposure (4-48h and 7-10 days), using a battery of tests (i.e.

Cell death following BNCT: a theoretical approach based on Monte Carlo simulations.

In parallel to boron measurements and animal studies, investigations on radiation-induced cell death are also in progress in Pavia, with the aim of better characterisation of the effects of a BNCT treatment down to the cellular level. Such studies are being carried out not only experimentally but also theoretically, based on a mechanistic model and a Monte Carlo code. Such model assumes that: (1) only clustered DNA strand breaks can lead to chromosome aberrations; (2) only chromosome fragments within a certain threshold distance can undergo misrejoining; (3) the so-called "lethal aberrations" (dicentrics, rings and large deletions) lead to cell death.

Boron uptake measurements in a rat model for Boron Neutron Capture Therapy of lung tumours.

Lung carcinoma is the leading cause of cancer mortality in the Western countries. Despite the introduction over the last few years of new therapeutic agents, survival from lung cancer has shown no discernible improvement in the last 20 years. For these reasons any efforts to find and validate new effective therapeutic procedures for lung cancer are very timely.

In vitro and in vivo studies of boron neutron capture therapy: boron uptake/washout and cell death.

Boron neutron capture therapy (BNCT) is a binary radiotherapy based on thermal-neutron irradiation of cells enriched with (10)B, which produces α particles and (7)Li ions of short range and high biological effectiveness. The selective uptake of boron by tumor cells is a crucial issue for BNCT, and studies of boron uptake and washout associated with cell survival studies can be of great help in developing clinical applications. In this work, boron uptake and washout were characterized both in vitro for the DHDK12TRb (DHD) rat colon carcinoma cell line and in vivo using rats bearing liver metastases from DHD cells.