With Institut Curie, Thales is putting its critical technologies to work in the fight against cancer

The aim is ambitious: to build,  a FLASH radiotherapy platform using very-high-energy electrons, known as VHEE at Institut Curie’s Orsay site near Paris. By 2029, this one-of-a-kind facility is expected to demonstrate the efficacy and safety of this approach before it can be used to treat patients with cancers carrying a particularly poor prognosis.

Discovered in 2014 in Institut Curie’s laboratories, FLASH radiotherapy makes it possible to deliver highly intense, targeted radiation in less than a second, destroying cancer cells while very largely sparing healthy tissue. As current technologies struggle to reach deep-seated tumours, FRATHEA aims to overcome this limitation by combining the FLASH effect with electrons in the 100 to 200 MeV range, compared with around 10 MeV in conventional radiotherapy.

Thales, the industrial integrator behind a medical breakthrough

Thales’ legitimacy in the project is rooted in expertise built up over 50 years. “We already supply subsystems for major accelerators, particularly for radiofrequency amplification, which is the real engine of accelerators and lies at the heart of our business. We also have a long-standing history of cooperation with the CEA on accelerators, for scientific as well as sovereign applications,” says Antoine Loidreau.

The challenge is not simply to produce a powerful beam. It must also be steered with extreme precision — almost like “a paintbrush carefully tracing only the tumour and the treatment area,” he adds.

This power should make it possible to reach deep-seated tumours, up to around 20 centimetres inside the human body. The goal is to be able to treat cancers such as lung and pancreatic cancers, brain tumours and certain paediatric cancers for which conventional radiotherapy is too risky. “For the teams, this is an extremely compelling project. It brings together physics, engineering and very high-level technologies, with an obvious societal impact,” Antoine Loidreau says.

A scientific, industrial and sovereign project

Beyond the scientific feat, FRATHEA also carries an industrial and sovereign ambition: to build a French and European ecosystem around a breakthrough medical technology.

“This project is a remarkable example of multidisciplinary teamwork: the teams from Thales, Institut Curie and the CEA, together with researchers and clinicians, must move forward together to turn the FLASH effect into an experimental and then clinical reality.”

This is what lies at the core of the project: taking a laboratory discovery and developing it into a robust technological platform that could, in the future, revolutionise care for the most difficult-to-treat cancers.