New initiative in the fight against cancer: IFIC coordinates the European AIDER project
A team from the Institute of Corpuscular Physics (IFIC), a joint center of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and the University of Valencia (UV), is taking the lead in a new initiative to fight cancer through medical physics. The project, called AIDER (Advanced Imaging Detector for targeted Radionuclide therapy) and coordinated by researcher Gabriela Llosá, aims to develop a medical imaging tool to support targeted therapy using radioactive atoms, or radionuclides. The consortium bringing this idea to life includes four European academic groups, a company, two hospitals, and a patient association, working together over the next four years.
Targeted radionuclide therapy (TRT) uses radiopharmaceuticals to deliver radiation directly to cancer cells in specific organs. As radionuclides (radioactive atoms) decay, they emit radiation that destroys tumor cells. Precisely measuring the radiation dose in both the lesions and nearby organs at risk is key to making treatments safer for patients and reducing side effects.
The AIDER project will build an imaging system based on technology initially developed by IFIC’s IRIS group, enhancing its performance by integrating state-of-the-art detectors and electronics. It will also improve image quality and the dosimetry of treatments. The system, to be tested in the consortium’s hospitals, represents an important step toward bringing this technique into clinical practice and strengthening this research line internationally.
The consortium includes experts from Claude Bernard University Lyon 1 and its affiliated institutions CNRS and INSA Lyon, the Léon Bérard Cancer Center in Lyon, and the company DAMAVAN Imaging (France); the Politecnico di Milano (Italy); the Institute of Medical Engineering at the University of Lübeck (Germany); as well as La Fe University and Polytechnic Hospital of Valencia and the Association of Parents of Children with Cancer of the Valencian Community.
AIDER is a European collaborative project funded by the Horizon Europe programme.
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