Dual aspect of radioenhancers and free radical scavengers

Combining an external beam of ionizing particles with agents to augment the dose effects of cell damages for therapeutic purpose is an important goal of radiotherapy. This last decade intensive works have focused on metal compounds or metal nanoparticles as radiosensitizers to increase the oxidative damages under irradiation. In principle the nanoparticles can be coated with a functionalized shell, to achieve a specific targeting of the tissues, making such approach attractive. The functionalized coating is made of polymers. These molecules are able to scavenge the free radicals, thus, the coating can decrease the overall efficacy of the radiation. The purpose of the present model is to analyse the role of free hydroxyl radicals in the dual behaviour of the added agent. Consideration of the efficiency of the added agents versus the Linear Energy Transfer - LET - of the ionizing particles is made. It is shown that an efficient agent combined with a low-LET particle beams might become less efficient when high-LET particles like heavy-ions are used. These general considerations should be useful to optimize the design of the nanoparticles to be combined with the different kind of ionizing particles.