Treating Cancer with Beams of Anti-Matter

Zeinfeld writes "According to this Economist article scientists at CERN are using beams of antimatter to destroy cancer cells. The basic idea is that you make some anti-protons, whizz them round in a accelerator to get them moving at a decent rate then fire them at living tissue. They burrow down to the desired depth, find a friendly proton and do a spot of mutual anihilation, releasing sufficient energy in the process to kill a cell or two. The trick is that matter/anti-matter anihilation is a bit like nuclear fission, it does not work if the particles are moving too fast. The anti-proton has to be moving slowly enough to get pulled into the orbit of some atomic nucleus and actually collide. This allows the treatment to be fine tuned so it only affects the tissues at a very specific depth - unlike traditional therapies which zap everything in the line of fire."

Comments

Shades of Boron Neutron Capture Therapy...

[2marcus]

So, sometime in the 1970s, MIT and Mass General were working on an experimental treatment called Boron Neutron Capture Therapy (BNCT for short). The idea was that you could fire thermal neutrons at a person, and they would only interact with elements that had a high neutron capture cross section, such as Boron or Gadolinium.

Neutron meets Boron, excitement ensues, cells die.

So, if you can add boron to a compound that is taken up preferentially by cancer cells, and then aim a thin beam of neutrons at the area of the tumor, then you will (theoretically) not kill anything but those cells.

The treatment was used mainly on large, likely-to-be-fatal brain tumors (at the time, they weren't candidates for operations). Unfortunately, most of the patients died anyway, sometimes from necrotic tissue or brain voids resulting from the decayed/destroyed tumor, sometimes because the boron containing compounds were not specific enough to cancer cells.

So the US stopped research on BNCT, but Japan and some other countries have continued the research, and I think recently some US researchers are thinking of taking it back up.

And the neutron source the MIT researchers used was their nuclear reactor (recently featured on NPR's "Wait, wait don't tell me"). One could presumably also use an accelerator.

-Marcus