“I feel absolutely fantastic,” she said.

The technique, called brachytherapy, works by damaging the DNA in what’s known as smooth-muscle cells  to prevent them from multiplying as part of the healing response.

It was developed more than a decade ago to treat patients with bare-metal stents whose arteries became reclogged.

It fell out of favor with the advent of stents that are coated with drugs to prevent these repeat blockages, called restenosis. But now physicians are getting interested in brachytherapy for the small number of patients in whom drug-coated stents do not work, said Jefferson cardiologist Michael Savage.

“After you’ve had 3 layers of stents in there, if the stents aren’t working at that point, it’s time to think of other options,” Savage said.

Brachytherapy also does not work for everyone. But Vandeputte was glad to have it as an option, given that she otherwise might have needed bypass surgery.

Though restenosis is no more common in women than men, Vandeputte’s crash course in cardiology began in June 2014, when she suffered a heart attack while recovering from a hysterectomy at Pennsylvania Hospital. Physicians there inserted two drug-coated stents into her right coronary artery, and she felt good at first.

A former smoker with high cholesterol, she adopted a heart-healthy diet and focused on staying active.

Nevertheless, 10 months after her heart attack, she started to feel increasingly short of breath. One day it got so bad that friends put her in an ambulance back to Pennsylvania Hospital, where she got another stent.

Seven months later, in November 2015, it happened again, and physicians placed two more stents. Then in May 2016, she went in for a stress test at Lankenau Hospital and learned the artery was once again nearly blocked. Physicians reopened the vessel with balloon angioplasty but did not put in another stent.

Instead, they mentioned the possibility of brachytherapy, which they said was offered at hospitals in New York and Washington, D.C., Vandeputte recalled.

Upon conducting an internet search, she found that Jefferson offered the procedure, too. So in August, when she suffered unstable angina, she was ready to try it.

Going in through an artery in Vandeputte’s left wrist, Savage first inserted a slender device equipped with a laser to cut away some of the blockage. Then he inserted a balloon to expand the vessel.

The radiation was the final step, administered by radiation oncologist Robert B. Den with a special catheter made by Best Vascular Inc. of Norcross, Ga., part of the TeamBest family of companies. He depressed a syringe to push a short chain of radioactive isotopes through the opening in Vandeputte’s wrist all the way up to her coronary artery.

The radiation is more intense than that in a chest X-ray but is delivered to a very small area, just a few millimeters long, and does not harm surrounding organs, Den said. He left the isotopes in place for a few minutes, then drew them back out.

Before the procedure, the coronary artery looked as if it had been pinched in several locations, almost like when a circus clown twists one of those long balloons to make a funny shape.

But the most recent angiogram, an image of the coronary artery taken in November with X-rays, showed the vessel wide open along its entire length.

Most important: it has been five months since the procedure, and Vandeputte feels good. But physicians still need to keep an eye on her.

In a recent study of 186 such patients who underwent brachytherapy at MedStar Washington Hospital Center, 12 percent had experienced a repeat blockage at 1 year. Jefferson’s experience has been similar, with one out of 10 such patients experiencing a repeat blockage, Savage said.

“It doesn’t take a lot of tissue to reclog the pipes, so to speak,” Savage said.

Exactly why restenosis strikes is not always clear. Vandeputte’s problem may have been exacerbated by scar tissue, caused by radiation treatments she had received for Hodgkin’s lymphoma decades earlier.

Vandeputte is optimistic and maintains a busy social schedule, often walking to restaurants and other outings with friends in South Philadelphia, even in the coldest temperatures.

“It’s freezing, but I’m able to breathe,” she said recently. “So thank you, Lord. I’m not complaining about the cold!”

“For the SPES aspect, the most intriguing part of nuclear physics is the ability to produce highly unstable nuclei, very different from those that we find on Earth,” says Giovanni Fiorentini, director of LNL. “Most of our knowledge about the properties of nuclei was acquired through the study of existing stable nuclei: the SPES beams open a new perspective that will provide knowledge about the properties of nuclei in extreme conditions.”

The heart of the SPES project is represented by high intensity cyclotron, a circular accelerator able to produce protons and accelerate at the rate of ten million protons every second. From the Cyclotron two proton beams will be extracted: one dedicated to the studies of nuclear astrophysics, and the other applications, in particular those directed to medicine, but also to the study of the properties of new materials, by means of the irradiation with neutrons.

“SPES is the flagship accelerator for nuclear physics that INFN offers to Italian researchers and those who wish to use it coming from other countries due to its competitiveness,” adds the president of INFN Fernando Ferroni. “Its purpose is still beyond that of basic research, because this accelerator will be also used for the production of particular radionuclides for nuclear medicine, which will be useful for the diagnosis and treatment of hear diseases and oncology.”

Among the innovative aspects of the project – a total value of around 50 million Euro, of which a dozen for only synchrotron – is also highlighted the funding system. For the SPES operation, it will be crucial that the funds will be derived from production of radioisotopes for medical use, an aspect which guarantees the project a prospect of autonomy and continuity.

SPES is part of the larger European project Eurisol, which today sees the European nuclear physicists engaged in the construction of three infrastructure of radioactive ion beams. In addition to SPES, under construction in France is a machine with similar characteristics, SPIRAL2, and CERN is in the process upgrading the existing equipment ISOLDE. These three machines will form a distributed infrastructure in Europe.