{"entity":{"id":"esrf","kind":"institution","name":"European Synchrotron Radiation Facility","aka":["ESRF","The European Synchrotron","ESRF-EBS"],"tldr":"A very large X-ray source in Grenoble, shared by 19 countries, where scientists study the structure of proteins and materials. Its biomedical beamline was one of the main places where microbeam radiation therapy, a way of treating tumours with arrays of extremely thin X-ray beams, was tested in animals.","summary":"The ESRF describes itself as the world's brightest synchrotron light source, owed to the cooperation of 19 partner countries. Its electrons circulate in a storage ring 844 metres in circumference, and more than 9,000 scientists a year use its beamlines. It was the world's first third-generation synchrotron (1988, in the facility's own account) and in 2020 launched the Extremely Brilliant Source (EBS), which the ESRF says improves brilliance and coherence by a factor of 100 over the previous source. Structural biology and medical applications are among the fields it lists, and its macromolecular crystallography beamlines are part of the infrastructure behind drug-target structures.\n\nFor oncology the relevant instrument is ID17, the biomedical beamline, with two endstations: one using a filtered white beam (40 to 600 keV) for microbeam, minibeam and pencil-beam radiation therapy and image-guided brain microsurgery, and one using monochromatic X-rays for imaging and radiation biology. The ESRF's MRT page describes microbeam radiation therapy as quasi-parallel arrays of microbeams about 25 to 75 microns wide, spaced 100 to 400 microns centre to centre, shaped by a multi-slit collimator, and reports preclinical work in mice, rats, piglets and rabbits in which peak entrance doses of several hundred gray were well tolerated by normal tissue while tumour tissue, and especially tumour vasculature, was preferentially damaged. As read on 3 November 2026 the ID17 page lists the beamline as \"on hold until further notice\", status closed.","asOf":"2026-11-03","links":[{"label":"About the ESRF","url":"https://www.esrf.fr/about"},{"label":"ID17 Biomedical Beamline","url":"https://www.esrf.fr/UsersAndScience/Experiments/ID17"},{"label":"Microbeam Radiation Therapy (MRT) at ID17","url":"https://www.esrf.fr/home/UsersAndScience/Experiments/ID17/mrt-1.html"}],"tags":[],"related":[],"cancers":[],"sections":[],"technologies":["microbeam-radiotherapy","structural-biology-infrastructure"],"targets":[],"drugs":[],"companies":[],"institutions":[],"pathways":[],"terms":[],"trials":[],"people":[],"bottlenecks":[],"keyPapers":[],"journals":[],"dependsOn":[],"notes":["The ESRF's own MRT page reports twenty years of preclinical MRT research there but does not claim the technique originated in Grenoble; it was first proposed at Brookhaven National Laboratory (Slatkin and colleagues, 1992).","The ID17 page listed the beamline as on hold and closed on 3 November 2026; no reason or reopening date was given on the page.","No human MRT treatment at the ESRF is stated on the pages read, and none is claimed here."],"city":"Grenoble","country":"FR","lat":45.209,"lng":5.69,"institutionType":"research-institute","website":"https://www.esrf.fr","programs":["ID17 biomedical beamline (microbeam, minibeam and pencil-beam radiation therapy; biomedical imaging)","Macromolecular crystallography and structural biology beamlines","ESRF-EBS Extremely Brilliant Source"]},"route":"/institutions/esrf/","neighbours":{"technology":[{"id":"microbeam-radiotherapy","kind":"technology","name":"Microbeam radiation therapy (MRT)","route":"/technologies/microbeam-radiotherapy/"},{"id":"structural-biology-infrastructure","kind":"technology","name":"Structural biology infrastructure (cryo-EM, synchrotrons, AlphaFold)","route":"/technologies/structural-biology-infrastructure/"}]}}