Photon (X-ray) radiotherapy is the most common treatment used in cancer therapy. However, the exposure of normal tissues and organs at risk to ionising radiation often results in a significant incidence of low-grade adverse side effects, whilst high-grade toxicities also occur at concerningly high rates. As an alternative, boron neutron capture therapy (BNCT) aims to create densely ionising helium and lithium ions directly within cancer cells, thus sparing the surrounding normal cells and tissues but also leading to significantly more effective tumour control than X-rays.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHigh-energy nuclear collisions create a quark-gluon plasma, whose initial condition and subsequent expansion vary from event to event, impacting the distribution of the eventwise average transverse momentum [P([p_{T}])]. Disentangling the contributions from fluctuations in the nuclear overlap size (geometrical component) and other sources at a fixed size (intrinsic component) remains a challenge. This problem is addressed by measuring the mean, variance, and skewness of P([p_{T}]) in ^{208}Pb+^{208}Pb and ^{129}Xe+^{129}Xe collisions at sqrt[s_{NN}]=5.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe incidence of head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC), currently ~800,000 cases per year worldwide, is rising. Radiotherapy remains a mainstay for the treatment of HNSCC, although inherent radioresistance, particularly in human papillomavirus (HPV)-negative disease subtypes, remains a significant barrier to effective treatment. Therefore, combinatorial strategies using drugs or inhibitors against specific cellular targets are necessary to enhance HNSCC radiosensitivity to lead to an improvement in patient outcomes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe rise in antibiotic resistance limits the availability of antibiotics to treat bacterial infections. Despite this, antibiotic development pipelines remain sparse which makes using adjuvants to reverse antibiotic resistance a promising therapeutic strategy. The use of vancomycin, a frontline antibiotic used to treat hospitalized patients with methicillin-resistant (MRSA) infections, is complicated by high rates of treatment failure.
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