The overview and prospects of BNCT facility at Tsing Hua Open-pool reactor
Introduction
The BNCT facility at Tsing Hua Open-pool Reactor (THOR) started construction in 2000 and was completed in 2005. After the commissioning test and pre-clinical study, it went to clinical trials since August 11, 2010. Up to now, it has carried out two clinical trials for recurrent head and neck cancer. For the first protocol of the clinical trial, there were 17 patients, each patient underwent two fractions of treatment with an interval of one month. There were 9 patients in the second protocol, each patient underwent one fraction of treatment and one month later received an image-guided intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IG-IMRT). Since 2017 it launched into emergent (compassionate) treatment for patients with a variety of cancers. In this paper, an overview of the BNCT facility at THOR will be elaborated at first. In the end, the prospects of the facility will then be presented.
Section snippets
Historical development of BNCT in Taiwan
Some professors of different disciplines at National Tsing Hua University (NTHU), Hsinchu started BNCT research early in 1992. They were engaged separately in the preliminary design of an epithermal neutron beam for BNCT, development of measurement technique for beam characterization, and investigation of boron drug pharmacokinetics. From 2000 to 2005, we received a grant of national R&D (research and development) project from the National Science Council with a total amount of 3.85 M US$ to
Prospects
The BNCT facility at THOR is positioned as a facility for conducting clinical trials, emergent (compassionate) treatments and inter-disciplinary R&D works. It is cordially open to the BNCT community all around the world. After the next license renewal in 2021 THOR can be operated for another ten years.
Summary
BNCT research started in Taiwan early in 1992. The epithermal neutron beam BNCT facility at THOR was established in 2005. The first patient irradiation in clinical trials for recurrent head and neck cancer was on August 11, 2010. We have accomplished two phase I/II clinical trials for recurrent head and neck cancer, where 26 patients have been treated with 9 CRs and 4 survivals. Since 2017 we have engaged in emergent (compassionate) treatments on case by case and approved basis mainly for
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Shiang-Huei Jiang: Writing - original draft, Methodology, Investigation. Yen-Wan Hsueh Liu: Methodology, Investigation. Fong-In Chou: Methodology, Investigation. Hong-Ming Liu: Investigation. Jinn-Jer Peir: Investigation. Yuan-Hao Liu: Investigation. Yu-Shiang Huang: Investigation. Ling-Wei Wang: Methodology, Investigation. Yi-Wei Chen: Methodology, Investigation. Sang-Hue Yen: Supervision, Investigation. Yuan-Hung Wu: Methodology, Investigation. Ching-Sheng Liu: Investigation. Jia-Cheng Lee:
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgment
This work was mainly supported by the National Science Council of the Republic of China, Taiwan under contract numbers NSC89-2745-P-007-004, NSC91-2745-P-007-001, NSC92-2745-P-007-002, and NSC94-2212-E-007-069 and -136 and partly supported by the Institute of Nuclear Energy Research, Atomic Energy Council of the republic of China, Taiwan and the boost program funded by National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan.
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Beam port filters in a TRIGA MARK III nuclear reactor to produce epithermal neutrons for BNCT
2022, Applied Radiation and IsotopesCitation Excerpt :Facilities to produce epithermal neutrons for BNCT include Nuclear Research Reactors and particle accelerators. Among reactor facilities are: The MARIA reactor at the National Center for Nuclear Research (NCBJ) in Poland, where also is intended to build a new research laboratory for BNCT (Tyminska et al., 2020); the FiR 1 in Finland, that was in operation between the years 1962–2015 (Räty et al., 2019; Savolainen et al., 2013); the Tsing Hua Open Pool Reactor (THOR) in Taiwan (Shiang-Huei et al., 2020), the Miniature Neutron Source Reactors (MNSR) in Syria and Iran (Shaaban and Albarhoum, 2015; Monshizadeh et al., 2015) where filters and beam shaping plugs have been used to produce epithermal neutrons. Research reactors have been also designed like the Low Power Medical Reactor (Mokhtari et al., 2017) and the multipurpose research reactor (Mokhtari et al., 2020).
Design and performance of an epithermal neutron flux detector using <sup>55</sup>Mn(n,γ)<sup>56</sup>Mn reaction for BNCT
2021, Applied Radiation and IsotopesCitation Excerpt :The treatment neutron beams of two operating reactor-based BNCT facilities, i.e., Kyoto University Reactor (KUR) in Japan and THOR in Taiwan, which have been used clinically so far, are employed to evaluate the performance of the proposed epithermal neutron flux detector by using MCNP5 simulations. The spectra of the BNCT treatment beams of KUR and THOR are shown in Fig. 6(a) (Tanaka et al., 2009) and 6(b) (Jiang et al., 2020), respectively. In this work, a spherical activation detector using 55Mn(n,γ)56Mn reaction is designed by MCNP5 simulations to determine the epithermal neutron flux of BNCT treatment beam.
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