Helmholtz Zentrum München Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Gesundheit und Umwelt

Noemi Castelletti from ISS receives travel and poster award

Noemi Castelletti, graduate student in the work group “Integrative modelling” (Institute of Radiation Protection, ISS), received a travel award for one of the 8 best abstracts and an honorable mention for the best poster at the “2016 Conference on Radiation and Health & Radiation Research Society”. The conference was held in Big Island, Hawaii (USA) on 15-20 October 2016. Castelletti is member of the Helmholtz Research School of Radiation Sciences RS2.

Noemi Castelletti

Noemi Castelletti gave an oral presentation and presented a poster with the title “Mechanistic Modeling of Radiation and Smoking causing Lung Cancer”. The results of her research project showed that the development of normal lung-cells into lung-cancer cells is a different process for smokers and for non-smokers. Radiation showed the biggest effects on the death/inactivation rate of the initiated cells in both pathways. These effects were interpreted as a lifelong molecular damage in the cells.

Smoking also strongly affected the death/inactivation rate, but it was interpreted to be an inflammation process.

Radiation effects were sex-independent, smoking effects were strongly sex-related. These differences are very important in considering datasets that contain smoking information. Not considering smoking as an important factor leads to a misunderstanding of the analyzed dataset.

Further information

http://www.radres.org/?page=CRH