Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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
So now you're giving my anti-self my cancer. That's kinda mean.
Ever heard of a Bragg Peak?
Ever heard of multi-beam treatment?
Sheesh!
Actually, if you read the article instead of the Slashdot synopsis. The point of using anti-protons is that you get the same effect as Bragg Peak (didn't know the name until you mentioned it thanks!) with regular protons. In addition, shortly after dumping most of the ionization energy into the tumor tissue, the anti-proton meets a proton causing more damage at the targeted location. I think the idea is that even while proton treatments can be well targeted they still deliver radiation doses to intervening tissue, by using anti protons you can deliver more radiation for the same dose to intervening tissue.
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.
You don't have any idea what your talking about, do you?
X-Ray therapy would involve gamma particles (aka photons) not alpha particles. Alpha particles are ionized helium.
As for the whole, spin thing, you must be smoking crack.
What is sometimes done, is stereotactic radiotherapy. Multiple beams of gamma rays are aimed so that they all cross at a single point. Each beam by itself won't cause much damage, but at the point where they cross, the combined dose is enought to kill the tumor. You can also do this by spining a weak beam for an extended period of time. Maybe that is what you meant?
The Economics of Website Security
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