**8. Role of LEEs in radiosensitization and radiation therapy**

A major impetus for achieving a better understanding of the action of ionizing radiation in biological systems relates to applications in radioprotection and radiotherapy. Since LEEs play a major role in transferring the energy of the initial high‐energy particle or photon to initiate all subsequent chemistry in irradiated media, understanding their interaction with biomole‐ cules is now being recognized as a crucial and essential step toward such applications. As seen from Section 4, in the last decades, our expanding knowledge of LEE–DNA interactions has been applied to experiments involving known radiosensitizers. Both at the theoretical and experimental levels, this work served to suggest new compounds having radiation‐damage enhancing properties and to explain the details of their response to high‐energy radiation either alone or when bound to DNA (i.e., the main target for cell killing in radiotherapy).
