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Panoramic view on the North Campus © Jürgen Huhn​/​TU Dortmund
AROUND SIX MILLION EUROS FOR NEW RESEARCH TRAINING GROUP

DFG Funds Research on Proton Therapy by University Alliance Ruhr

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Modern treatment room for proton therapy with blue lighting and medical equipment. © Westdeutsches Protonentherapiezentrum Essen
The Research Training Group is dedicated to new approaches to proton therapy, which is used clinically at the West German Proton Therapy Center in Essen.
In the future, early career researchers in the Ruhr region will be able to complete their doctoral degrees at the interface between physics, chemistry and medicine and explore the promising field of proton therapy: The German Research Foundation (DFG) has approved the setting up of Research Training Group (RTG) 3043 “AMTEC-PRO” at TU Dortmund University and the University of Duisburg-Essen, which it will support with around 6 million euros in funding for an initial five years starting in October 2025. Spokesperson for the new RTG is Professor Kevin Kröninger from the Department of Physics at TU Dortmund University.

Proton therapy is an advanced type of radiotherapy that is used to treat cancer: A targeted beam of protons, i.e. positively charged particles, is directed at tumor cells. Compared to X-ray radiation, protons have the advantage that they release their energy in the tumor tissue with a very high level of precision, destroy it and generally spare the surrounding healthy tissue. In the first funding phase, 24 doctoral candidates from chemistry, physics and engineering will conduct research into methods associated with this particle technology and with machine learning as part of their doctoral projects. Among other things, they will work on developing new instruments to further improve the precision of proton therapy. To kill tumor cells even more effectively and further reduce the undesirable side effects of radiotherapy, they will also study radiation effects at various levels.

“Within the Research Training Group, we want to transfer our strong expertise in basic research to medical applications. So that this technology transfer can succeed, our group includes experts from both basic research and the applied sciences as well as from clinical application,” explains RTG spokesperson Professor Kevin Kröninger from TU Dortmund University. The future doctoral supervisors are chemists, physicists, medical physicists and other medical professionals, computer scientists and engineers.

Bridge between basic research, technology and medicine

Portrait Prof. Kevin Kröninger © Hesham Elsherif​/​TU Dortmund
Prof. Kevin Kröninger is the spokesperson for the new Research Training Group.

The scientific partners participating in AMTEC-PRO – the acronym stands for “Advanced Methods and Technologies for Proton Therapy” – are TU Dortmund University and the University of Duisburg-Essen. The West German Proton Therapy Center, part of University Hospital Essen, is the RTG’s central clinical facility. AMTEC-PRO will profit from the excellent research infrastructures of the entire University Alliance Ruhr (UA Ruhr) and establish a UA Ruhr Visiting Chair for Particle Science for the alliance of the three Ruhr universities. Preliminary work important for the new Research Training Group has been conducted by the researchers involved in a UA Ruhr-wide project funded by the Mercator Research Center Ruhr (MERCUR).

In the long term, the aim of AMTEC-PRO is to establish a sustainable link between basic scientific research, new technologies and modern medicine in the Ruhr region. The doctoral candidates involved will also benefit from the RTG’s interdisciplinarity, which will open up career paths for them both in science and industry.

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