Modelling lung cells to personalize radiotherapy (with BioDynaMo) among the Top 10 Breakthroughs of the Year in physics for 2024!

 Last December the 12th Physics World has delighted announced its Top 10 Breakthroughs of the Year for 2024, which includes research in nuclear and medical physics, quantum computing, lasers, antimatter and (of course ^_^) BioDynaMo.



The Top Ten is the shortlist for the Physics World Breakthrough of the Year, which will be revealed on Thursday 19 December.


PhysicsWorld editorial team has looked back at all the scientific discoveries reported on since 1 January and has picked 10 they judge are the most important. In addition to being reported in Physics World in 2024, the breakthroughs must meet the following criteria: 

  • Significant advance in knowledge or understanding
  • Importance of work for scientific progress and/or development of real-world applications
  • Of general interest to Physics World readers 

You can listen to the editors making their case for the research in the Top10 in this podcast


What do they say about the BioDynaMo research they selected:

<<Modelling lung cells to personalize radiotherapy.

To Roman Bauer at the University of Surrey, UK, Marco Durante from the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research, Germany, and Nicolò Cogno from GSI and Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School, US, for creating a computational model that could improve radiotherapy outcomes for patients with lung cancer. Radiotherapy is an effective treatment for lung cancer but can harm healthy tissue. To minimize radiation damage and help personalize treatment, the team combined a model of lung tissue with a Monte Carlo simulator to simulate irradiation of alveoli (the tiny air sacs within the lungs) at microscopic and nanoscopic scales. Based on the radiation dose delivered to each cell and its distribution, the model predicts whether each cell will live or die, and determines the severity of radiation damage hours, days, months or even years after treatment. Importantly, the researchers found that their model delivered results that matched experimental observations from various labs and hospitals, suggesting that it could, in principle, be used within a clinical setting. >>

Congratulations  👏👏 to Dr Nicolo' Cogno, Prof. Marco Durante and Prof. Roman Bauer, and ad maiora


  • You can retrieve the original scientific paper at this link
  • You can re-read the original reporting at this link

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