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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."
This is what they told me when I was only visiting CERN last May. I'd imagine that the information could have been aquired on the cern website for a long time before that.
are going to need multi-km particle accelerator/colliders now?
Why do I get the feeling I can't afford to have cancer...
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
now all I need to get my warp reactor going again is to build a cancer cell injector.
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
Star Trek becoming reality, one cool invention at a time.
Pretty Pictures!
Your honor it isn't a death ray that I've developed, it is a cancer treatment device.
For dolts (like me) who had no clue what antimatter really is, I found this article over at Scientific American that gives a good overview and explains what exactly (and why) antimatter is. It's readable, too, to a non-physics geek.
--trb
Uhhhhhhhhhh........... this is soooooooo bs............
So, should we all be buying Polonium 207 futures?
caritj.org
Faster treatment of cancer patients can be achieved by sticking them in the nearest available warp core.
So now you're giving my anti-self my cancer. That's kinda mean.
It's a whole other type of Weapon of Mass Destruction!
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
Even regular X-Ray therapy those pesky alpha particles receive quite a spin, so they go straight to the set depth and then disperse, thus forming a focal point, without destroying any tissue in-between.
Think of it as playing pool, you can hit the ball so it goes straight with quite a spin on it, and as the ball slows down, the spin catches on, and makes to ball change direction.
Code poet, espresso fiend, starter upper.
I for one welcome our new high velocity cancer tissue destroying overlords.
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.
Ever heard of a Bragg Peak?
Ever heard of multi-beam treatment?
Sheesh!
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Fermilab has had a neutron beam therapy very similar to the CERN anti-proton therapy since 1976. Neutrons are radioactive by themselves with a half life of about 14 minutes. Once deposited in some tissue they will either decay or combine with an atom to form a radioactive isotope (which then decays).
There are other unique radio therapies including Brachytherapy (place radioactive isotopes in the tumor) and Radioimmunotherapy (attach a radioactive isotope to a nonoclonal antibody). The latter sounds very neat and targeted. But none address the fundamental problem -- why do cells turn cancerous.
-- Bob
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
Somebody please put a name to this:
:)
Several years ago, there were articles about a type of treatment that aimed two energy beams at a point in the body. Each beam was harmless (radio or such) but when they interfered, they created an ionizing radiation of sorts. So, you could precisely place the destruction where it was needed and not damage 'everything in the line of fire'. It was less exotic than antimatter.
Of course I can't remember what it was called.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
(-1)^2=(1)^2; sqrt((-1)^2)=sqrt(1^2); 1=1.
Because, sqrt((-1)^2)=|-1|, not -1, and therefore is 1. Right?
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
The latter sounds very neat and targeted. But none address the fundamental problem -- why do cells turn cancerous.
Biologists have a pretty good understanding of how cells turn cancerous, but that doesn't result in clear and obvious treatments.
In fact, the body has the ability to kill cancer cells if it recognizes that there is a problem and if the cancer hasn't become too large or encapsulated. All those crude methods help shift the balance back in the body's favor.
Think of it this way: if there is a 100000 men strong army on your borders, if you drop a huge bomb on them and manage to kill 99% of them, the remaining 1000 invaders are much less of a problem; perhaps even your regular police force can take care of them.
Charged particles are another ballgame altogether. I'm told (remember, IANAP) that the rate of energy loss of a charged particle in dense matter is strongly speed-dependent and it goes up as the speed goes down (see other posters re: Bragg peaks). This allows a beam of charged particles to be calibrated for depth, because it will run into a "sand trap" as it loses energy going through tissue and deposit most of its energy close to the end. I've heard of pions (pi mesons) being used for radiation treatment for just this reason.
Antiprotons would be another quantum leap (pun intentional) in effectiveness. The energy the antiproton spends busting molecular bonds and making free radicals on its way in is only the beginning. When an antiproton hits a nucleus, it annihilates a proton and forms three pions (pi+, pi-, and pi0). The pi0 is its own antiparticle and decays into two gamma rays which probably don't do much, but the pi+ and pi- are also heavy charged particles. If they aren't moving very fast they would deposit most of their kinetic energy within a very short distance of the site of annihilation, busting up more molecules and making more free radicals. Then they decay to muons (which are pretty hard to stop and probably wouldn't do much from then on). On top of this, any nucleus heavier than hydrogen is going to be transmuted by the loss of the proton, changing its chemistry if not shattering the molecule it's in from the momentum change. That makes antiprotons a triple-threat.
Free radicals do things like chewing up proteins and slicing DNA strands. Enough of this and even a cancer cell can't function, and it dies.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
One question about PET scans. I understand (mostly from other comments in the discussion) that radioisotope compounds that tend to accumulate in tumors are injected into the body. These isotopes generate positrons that are detected by the scanner.
But if they're generating positrons, what happens when the resulting positrons happen to encounter electrons? Is there enough energy released to help with the treatment, or is the energy negligible, or do the positive and negative charges prevent most collisions?
(Must resist urge to discuss Cmdr. Data's "positronic" brain...)
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.