Development of the proton irradiation platform Radiograaff for radiobiological studies
The work done in this thesis has been made in the development of a proton irradiation platform dedicated for radiobiological studies from the 4 MV Van de Graaff accelerator of the Institut de Physique Nucléaire de Lyon (IPNL). These developments have been made through a close interdisciplinary collaboration between physicists and engineers from IPNL and biologists from the Laboratoire de Radiobiologie Cellulaire et Moléculaire (LRCM, CHU Lyon Sud). To present the development of Radiograaff platform, this manuscript will split into three chapters. The first chapter introduces the basics of hadrontherapy and the scientific context of the project. In the first part of this chapter, we present the interactions between ion and matter in order to better understand the theoretical concepts associated with the hadrons. Then, we present the scientific interests and objectives of the Radiograaff project. The second chapter concerns the instrumental developments of the beam line. After discussing the delivery mode and beam extraction in air and simulation methods that we used to design the theoretical line radiation, we present the dosimetric monitoring system. The chapter 2 is concluded by the results of the evaluation and qualification of the platform. Finally, in the third chapter, after a brief presentation of some aspects of biology and radiobiology, we present the first results on the relative biological effectiveness of protons delivered by the Radiograaff platform. We discuss the protocols, experimental conditions and methods for analysing results