A grant to study ways to improve targeted radiation therapy in areas where sensitive organs can be damaged by cancer treatment has been awarded to a Jonsson Cancer Center scientist by the American Cancer Society.

Timothy Solberg, an associate professor of radiation oncology and director of medical physics at UCLA, will use the $796,000 Research Scholar Grant to develop technology that will compensate for the motion created by breathing in patients receiving radiation treatments.

Solberg and a team of investigators are developing mechanisms that will correlate changes in a patient’s internal anatomy with external monitoring devices that will enable specially designed linear accelerators to respond in real time — tracking and targeting tumors as they move due to breathing and other physical functions. Such technology, Solberg said, could allow for more effective therapies in the fight against lung and other cancers.

“We have already demonstrated that there is a clear efficacy in using a very focused, high dose approach to irradiating brain tumors,� Solberg said. “This approach should be equally efficacious in other parts of the body, but practical considerations such as respiratory motion have prevented this. This grant will allow us to develop similar targeting technology to account for respiratory motion and therefore make significant inroads in diseases such as lung cancer.�

Research Scholar Grants seek to support and promote the best cancer-related research across a wide range of disciplines. The American Cancer Society receives about 2,000 requests for grant funding every year, officials said.