FRINGE: Fluorescence and Reactive oxygen Intermediates by Neutron Generated electronic Excitation as a foundation for radically new cancer therapies

FRINGE is a research and innovation action funded under H2020-FETOPEN program (Grant Agreement No: 828922) that is focused on the development of a genuinely new hybrid-technology for cancer therapy.

Deep lying tumours like aggressive brain cancer remain very difficult to treat and existing therapies offer only marginal increase in survival rates. In the case of photomedical therapies they are very effective, but mainly limited by their insufficient depth of light penetration into tissue. Current neutron-based therapies have sufficient penetration depth but suffer from lack of cancer specificity.

FRINGE aims is to combine the advantages of both photomedical and neutron-based therapies to achieve high tumor treatment efficiency as well as large penetration depth in tissue. The NCSR “Demokritos” FRINGE scientific team comprises research scientists from 3 Institutes (INN, INRASTES and INPT). The main objective is the performance proof of principle experiments using accelerator and reactor based neutron sources in Greece and abroad, as well as neutronics calculations to optimize the experimental set-ups and theoretically interpret the results.