Speaker
Ngoc Hoang Tran
(Division of Nuclear Physics, Ton Duc Thang University, Tan Phong Ward, District 7, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.)
Description
Gold nanoparticles have been reported as possible radio-sensitizer agents in tumor radiation therapy, in particular through the increase of local energy deposition in close vicinity of the nanoparticles and subsequent direct damage to cells and DNA. Moreover, indirect damage originating from the increased production of chemical species induced by such additional energy deposition events around nanoparticles could also significantly contribute to cellular damage. In this work, we present for the first time a Monte Carlo simulation calculating energy deposition and radical species production around a gold nanoparticle of 50 nm-diameter, using the general purpose Geant4 simulation toolkit. The simulations are performed for incident proton energies ranging from 2 MeV to 170 MeV, which are of interest for clinical proton therapy. The Geant4-DNA extension was adopted in this study to model both the very low energy physics processes, the physico-chemistry and chemistry processes. This work clearly shows that the concentration of chemical species (such as e-aq, H2, H•, •OH, H3O+, OH-, H2O2) in liquid water is significantly increased around a gold nanoparticle immersed in liquid water and irradiated by incident MeV protons.
Primary author
Ngoc Hoang Tran
(Division of Nuclear Physics, Ton Duc Thang University, Tan Phong Ward, District 7, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.)
