Anti-Matter's Potential in Treating Cancer

eldavojohn writes "The BBC is taking a look at how atomic physicists are developing cancer treatments. A step past radiotherapy, the CERN institute is publishing interesting results: 'Cancer cells were successfully targeted with anti-matter subatomic particles, causing intense biological damage leading to cell death.' The press release from last year is finally sparking interest in the medical community."

Comments

Ah yes..

[ravenshrike]

Because setting off miniature broad-spectrum emp blasts inside your body it a GOOD thing.

Re:Ah yes..

[Anonymous Coward]

It is if you're a robot who wants to get high. Think about it. It would probably work.

Re:Ah yes..

[tomhudson]

WEll, they originally thought it would be a huge money-maker by using antimatter to clean teeth - eveyone wants a big white smile. However, trials proved that "tooth is stronger than fiction."

Re:Ah yes..

[profplump]

As opposed to cancer?

Or the current radition and chemical treatments?

Re:Ah yes..

[captnitro]

You mean, tooth is stronger than fission.

Re:Ah yes..

[speleo]

Because setting off miniature broad-spectrum emp blasts inside your body it a GOOD thing.

It is. Already being done: Positron emission tomography.

Re:Ah yes..

[jesdynf]

Because setting off miniature broad-spectrum emp blasts inside your body it a GOOD thing.

Yeah, having to reboot all your nanobots is so much worse than dying of cancer. The terrible spectre of EMP is a little less scary when you're already gonna die.

While I'm on the subject, though, cut them some slack. They're using antimatter. Antimatter! As medicine. Antimatter as medicine! This is the most awesome thing I've read this year. I thought nitroglycerin was cool, but this -- what's next? Using Great Old Ones to soothe colicky babies?

Re:Ah yes..

[stam66]

Because setting off miniature broad-spectrum emp blasts inside your body it a GOOD thing.

It is. Already being done: Positron emission tomography.

Somehow, monitoring the radioactive beta decay of a short-lived tracer in a PET scan doesn't quite seem as "interesting" as non-specifically bombarding body tissue indiscriminantly with high energy (be it conventional methods or "anti-matter"). To say that "Already been done" is stretching reality just a little (well, to the point i though i heard it scream).

Re:Ah yes..

[TeknoHog]

At least good old brushing works, since tooth is stronger than friction.

Re:Ah yes..

[FormOfActionBanana]

What are you accusing of being so nonspecific?
Particle beam: You can aim it, you can set its speed, particle mass and such properties.
Rays: you can aim it and tune it.

Plus, (as in the case of PET), there's no big reason why particles or beams couldn't be sourced from chemicals which attach to the target tissue.

Re:Ah yes..

[FormOfActionBanana]

I don't think PET is broad spectrum. I read that it's gamma rays, created in the body near positron emission of the contrast agent.

I don't see the applicability of comparing diagnostic to therapeutic techniques; the difference in magnitude between the two must be huge!

Re:Ah yes..

[eldaria]

And once they thought that using radioactive ingredients in tooth paste would also give you a whiter smile. :-)

Re:Ah yes..

[stam66]

Non-specific refers to the fact that to get to cancer cells (assuming you can localise them) you have to get through normal tissue, often a lot of it.

If it were simply a matter of "aim a particle beam" while adjusting other properties, it would have been done decades ago. Current non-anti-matter-particle beams or EM radiation are more than potent to kill cancer cells. Unfortunately it is equally deadly to normal tissues, which restricts it's current use. Radiotherapy in various forms has been around for ages and is effective, but is limited because of it's non-specificity.

How then is "anti-matter" any better? and to my knowledge, PET is a diagnostic test, not a therapeutic intervention (yes, i AM a doctor).

Re:Ah yes..

[Chacham]

Very cute.

Re:Ah yes..

[glock22ownr]

Hehehe, I just hope they weaponize it so we can blow up the whole planet in one fell swoop. Then when I turn to some form of energy, enter another dimenstion, whatever ( hoping theres an afterlife ), there better be an instant replay because watching our planet cease to exist from outter space would make a great YouTube video...

Re:Ah yes..

[ginbot462]

I think most parent probably would choose that if offered. I mean, you need to get some sleep.

Parent: What? Kill all my family and neighbors?
Parent: Huh? You're a talking black-lab?
Parent: Ug? You're a black lab - giant squid mix?
Parent: I speak only in questions?

Re:Ah yes..

[AdamThor]

Because setting off miniature broad-spectrum emp blasts inside your body it a GOOD thing.

For thoses worried about potential health effectses of anti-matter, I likes to present my own alternative research: The Hammer's Potential in Treating the Cancer.

Scientists say 'Cancer cells were successfully targeted with a hammer, causing intense biological damage leading to cell death.'

It works like this - you stands very still, and I hits you in the cancer with hammer.

Re:Ah yes..

[geekoid]

if by "Sooth" you mean "inhabit" then I have great news!

Yes it is cool.

Re:Ah yes..

[FormOfActionBanana]

OK. All points taken. Now, what if somebody wanted to bind a positron emitter to a monoclonal antibody for instance... for therapeutic use. Wouldn't the basic research of bombarding a slide of cells with positrons be useful to contribute to that design?

Re:Ah yes..

[stam66]

...what if somebody wanted to bind a positron emitter to a monoclonal antibody for instance... for therapeutic use ...
Sounds good in (oversimplified) theory - which is why research has been going on for this for some time - i can remember talk of this when i was a medical student in the 1980s (not only for radioactive substances, but also for drug delivery, e.g. chemotherapy or gene therapy with for example viruses), but to my knowledge this has never been successful or safe enough for widespread use.

No doubt some one will eventually come up with a delivery system/vector that will be effective and safe, but to come back to the original topic, anti-matter per se has nothing to do with this. Current ionising radiation, particle beams, chemotherapy etc are all effective cancer cell killers, particularly in vitro, but as cancer cells live in a sea of normal cells that is not the limiting factor but rather the "operation was a success but the patient died" scenario...

brilliant

[Lord Ender]

There are a lot of things that kill cancer cells. It's finding the things that kill exclusively cancer cells that's the hard part.

Re:brilliant

[MisterCookie]

You mean my acid bath treatment isn't a good idea?

Re:brilliant

[zebadee]

Thats kind of the purpose of the article, if you read it. They compare using charged particle beams to traditional radiotherapy treatment and comment that using particle beams allows the raditation to be better focused on the tumour (in this case a spinal tumour), leading to less death of surrounding tissue.

Re:brilliant

[jd]

What's wrong with a gamma knife? (Uses eight sources, none of which are exceptionally dangerous in themselves, such that the area of overlap is totally lethal.)

For that matter, since cancer cells tend to generate heat, the cancerous region should be nearer the point of cell death than non-cancerous tissue. Use microwaves to raise the water temperature such that healthy cells will still be below the threshold but cancer cells are cooked.

Alternatively, cancer cells must pull in far more amino acids than healthy cells simply to duplicate so rapidly. Synthesize some amino acids that use an isotope you know the frequency for a-la x-ray fluorescence. Beam in some x-rays at the required frequency. The isotope will absorb them and emit electrons. Because the cancerous cells have more of the isotope, they will have more electrons blasting around. I would have thought you could do some really nasty things to the cancer before the healthy cells even noticed the extra charge on their bill.

Re:brilliant

[imsabbel]

gamma knife= bad at best, horrible in practice. There IS NO SAFE LEVEL FOR IONIZING RADIATION. Splitting it in 8 beams only increases the amount of affected tissue. The only reason its in use is that its marginally better than dying.

Bragg-peak of decellerating particles== huge dosage in a very tiny volume, relatively little interaction of the particles during the inition part of ther journey through the body.

And, as i post this right now from beamline 8.0 of the Advanced Light Source in berkeley, i can tell you that biological molecules have nice brought absorption spectra, and while there might by sharp pi-resonances, those are smeared out a lot in liquid solutions (plus, the carbon edge is really crowded, there is no empty space to "design a molecule" to.

Re:brilliant

[MillionthMonkey]

You think you're surprised? I've been spraying myself with positrons every morning for the past five years to look younger!

Re:brilliant

[Flodis]

You think you're surprised? I've been spraying myself with positrons every morning for the past five years to look younger!

You should've used tachyons.

Re:brilliant

[Ihlosi]

gamma knife= bad at best, horrible in practice. There IS NO SAFE LEVEL FOR IONIZING RADIATION.

That's not necessary. The function of tissue_damage(irradiation) only needs to be nonlinear, and preferably start out fairly flat and increase in steepness with increasing irradiation.

Pretty much every effective cancer treatment has fairly nasty side effects. Did you know that the first chemotherapy agents were direct derivatives of mustard gas ?

Re:brilliant

[Goaway]

Oh man, you just cured cancer! I guess it's a nobel prize for you!

Re:brilliant

[kalirion]

The solution would seem to be kamakazi nanobots created out of anti-matter. They're smart enough to recognize a cancer cell, and once they do they go give it a big hug!

Re:brilliant

[ajmilton]

Did you know that the first chemotherapy agents were direct derivatives of mustard gas ?

Still are too, apparently. A fellow I know just went back in for chemo (cancer came back, suck) and they apparently still use mustard gas.

Re:brilliant

[hondo77]

gamma knife= bad at best, horrible in practice. There IS NO SAFE LEVEL FOR IONIZING RADIATION. Splitting it in 8 beams only increases the amount of affected tissue. The only reason its in use is that its marginally better than dying.

As someone whose wife went under the gamma knife, I have to tell you that you are full of shit...at best. She went under in the morning to zap a brain tumor and I took her home that afternoon (or was it the next morning?--I forget which). The tumor was completely destroyed and she suffered no ill-effects whatsoever. Major brain surgery, one day in the hospital, no cutting, no side-effects. Yeah, that was pretty horrible.

Re:brilliant

[OrdinarySoul]

I thought they found out Vitamin C and Vitamin E are extremely toxic to cancer cells but leave the normal cells alone.

Re:brilliant

[Anonymous Coward]

Minor correction: 201 sources with beams of variable diameter.

Re:brilliant

[jd]

If you can just increase it to 2001 and have the whole thing controlled by a computer that uses a camera with an embedded red light...

Re:brilliant

[jd]

The Greeks had formal proofs that, one day, humans would have fully automated machines capable of performing menial work normally given to laborers. My wild speculations are about on that level. As with them, I probably have the basic form about right and the basic results about right. Also as with them, there are probably a few million bits in between that I don't know.

But, then, maybe I have the correct solution. And how many had built functioning powered heavier-than-air aircraft before the Wright Brothers? Probably a few dozen. Who gets the credit? The guys with the best PR.

And, finally, who the hell ever gives a damn about what's written on a blog? Each and every Slashdotter could post up tomorrow an absolutely perfect solution to the top 100 great mysteries in science and medicine, yet it would have bugger all impact. That's the nature of industry - the Not Invented Here syndrome is alive and well. Part of that is that there are a few billion posts being written to blogs each day. If a hundred pieces of utter brilliance were posted a day, that gives you ten million crap posts for every enlightened one. Who has the time to look through them for those gems? And it's very unlikely it's even close to a hundred great postings a day.

Newfangled, downtown fancy pants hightech.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds too newfangled and high tech for me.

I'd prefer it if they used they did what they did back in my great-great-grandfather's time: the Shotgun Method
The doctor/vet/farmboy would place the muzzle of the shotgun to the tumour and blast it out. Sure, there's some peripheral damage and blood loss but it's tried and true. Sucks if you use it to treat testicular cancer, but a light 410 load of birdshot, some frozen peas and you'd be back on your feet in 8 months.

But my complete understanding of physics says...

[thomasdz]

That you need Dilithium crystals and a Scottish engineer to make it work effectively.
(either that or you need to reverse the polarity of something or other and channel the output through the main sensor grid) ...or am I mixing up TV with reality again? :-)

TDz.

I call see the ads now

[edwardpickman]

Warp speed cancer treatment!

Re:I call see the ads now

[countach]

In other news, and explosion centred on London hospital with the energy of a thousand suns obliterated central London yesterday.....

Re:I call see the ads now

[Linker3000]

Yeah, but that cancer's history - that'll learn it!

What about this?

[Manchot]

Is anyone else turned off by the idea of putting material in your body that will literally annihilate parts of you? Oh well, I guess it can't be any worse than injecting you with lethal poisons and hoping that the cancer absorbs most of it. :)

Re:What about this?

[grub]

Is anyone else turned off by the idea of putting material in your body that will literally annihilate parts of you?

Like what booze is doing to my liver?

Re:What about this?

[Billosaur]

People already get bombarded by radiation to kill tumor cells -- this isn't that much different, except that the damage to the tumor is more direct and probably at a higher concentration than with ordinary bursts of radiation. You get the twin effect of the anti-particles annihilating their particle counterparts and the secondary radiation (mainly gamma) given off by that annihilation.

Re:What about this?

[yotto]

Personally, I'd be more turned off by the idea of a growth of runaway cells taking over my body and killing me. If I had it, I'd happily let them dump a bit of antimatter in me, rather than DIE.

Re:What about this?

[porcupine8]

But they're parts of you that have already turned traitor and are trying to kill you. So trust me, you won't feel too guilty about it. If nothing else, it'll serve as a stern warning to all those other cells that they damn well better keep their DNA in line.

Re:What about this?

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

Hopefull they don't mix metric with atomic mass units.

Ready all weapons...

[Microlith]

Fire the micro-Photon torpedos!

Okay n00b question

[Frogbert]

Can someone please explain what Anti-matter actually is? Is it matter just misnamed and slightly different? Is it the absence of matter?

Could I hold it?

How do you make it?

Re:Okay n00b question

[TheRealMindChild]

Antimatter is... just as it sounds. The opposite of matter.

Click here for more info

Re:Okay n00b question

[HBI]

A complete set of mirror image subatomic particles. The antimatter analogue to the electron is the positron, etc.

No you can't hold it. It annihilates matter when it comes into contact with it, releasing a burst of energy.

Theoretically the Big Bang created equal amounts of matter and antimatter, but we're wondering where the antimatter is...maybe whole galaxies are composed of it? There's no way to tell from the light - photons are the same whether generated by matter or antimatter.

Short of that, small amounts are created in particle accelerators and in the upper atmosphere, I believe.

As usual, Wikipedia is helpful.

Re:Okay n00b question

[Tablizer]

Can someone please explain what Anti-matter actually is?

It is kind of like negative Mod points. They anialate your Karma.

Re:Okay n00b question

[radtea]

Antimatter is... just as it sounds. The opposite of matter.

"Matter" in ordinary parlance has various important properties: solidity, resistance to motion (otherwise known as mass) and so on.

Anti-matter has every single one of these properties, so it is not particularly helpful to say it is "the opposite of matter" because it is not.

Anti-matter is simply matter that consists of anti-particles, as correctly indicated by the article you link. Anti-particles are just like ordinary particles except that they have the opposite charge, parity or magnetic moment (in the case of neutrons). This minor change results in a fairly large cross-section for mutual annihilation when an anti-particle scatters off of its corresponding particle.

Re:Okay n00b question

[gnool]

There's no harm in being friendly and helpful ;-)

Re:Okay n00b question

[Planesdragon]

Wrong.

No, that's what he said.

Your failure to grasp his words does not invalidate them, it merely illuminates your own poor understanding of the topic.

Let's put it another way: if there was an anti-sun with an anti-solar system, exactly like Earth but with every particle the inverse of our Earth, they would be exactly the same. (Even when they eventually met and obliterated each other -- matter blows up antimatter just as well as antimatter blows up matter.)

Re:Okay n00b question

[Anonymous Coward]

So if you were to eat pasta after eating antipasto, would they annihilate one another?
*me ducks* ;)

Re:Okay n00b question

[Anonymous Coward]

Your article doesn't refute anything that was stated by the person to whom you're responding.

You must have either a weak grasp of physics or a problem with properly using a web browser.

Re:Okay n00b question

[metlin]

It is kind of like negative Mod points. They anialate your Karma.

And apparently, your spelling too! =)

Re:Okay n00b question

[poopdeville]

I would imagine that the anti-matter ended up roughly on the other side of the universe as us. Imagine two equally sized spheres of matter and anti-matter. If they come in contact, there will be a massive explosion. But that obviously doesn't mean that all the matter and anti-matter were annihilated. The explosion would work to move the matter and anti-matter apart.

Re:Okay n00b question

[Anonymous Coward]

There is more matter than anti matter in the universe because certain decays of certain particles have a slight perference to matter. This principle is being studied at accelerators in the USA (SLAC) and Japan (KEK) among others. These two facilities have B factories, which are accelerators that make billions of B mesons and measure the amount of asymmetry between B and anti-B decays which occur from them. For more info checkout: http://www-public.slac.stanford.edu/babar/

Re:Okay n00b question

[Mr. Bad Example]

> [antimatter is] A complete set of mirror image subatomic particles.
 
...each with a tiny, tiny goatee.

Re:Okay n00b question

[Anonymous Coward]

picture an electron, now an anti electron (a positron) has the opposite charge from an electron, and i believe the opposite spin too.

an anti proton has the opposite charge from a proton (no fancy name for an anti proton i'm afraid).

another way to look at it is that anti matter is the same particles as regular matter except that anti matter is moving backwards through time.

so if you take an electron and an anti electron. you've got a negative charge and a positive charge, spin one way and spin the other way. put them together in the same point in space and now the charges cancel each other out, the spins cancel each other out, in fact everything cancels each other out. except that both particles had energy, and sicne energy has no negative, this energy gets released while the particles annihilate each other.

make sense? no? good you're up to speed with most physics graduates now.

Re:Okay n00b question

[flyingfsck]

Get a copy of Prof Hawkins' "A brief History of Time". He explains it all really well and there is only one formula in the book.

Re:Okay n00b question

[Tim C]

Antimatter is... just as it sounds. The opposite of matter.

No it isn't, not at all. An anti-particle is identical to the corresponding particle, except that certain properties are reversed. For an easy-to-grasp example, the anti-electron has a positive electrical charge, while the anti-proton has a negative electrical charge. (Obviously it's not that simple, and other quantum-mechanical properties are reversed too, such as spin). It would be truer to say that anti-matter is the "mirror reflection" of matter, but "opposite of matter" is pretty-much meaningless.

To answer the OP's other question, no you can't hold it. When an anti-matter particle meets its matter equivalent, the two are annihilated producing a gamma photon; if you were to actually touch a lump of anti-matter, you'd lose whatever you touched it with (and most likely the rest of yourself, a large chunk of the building you were in, etc). That is mostly immaterial though, as anti-matter can't survive for long in an atmosphere - all those air molecules are comprised of matter particles, all of which are going to be annihilating with their anti-matter equivalents (protons and anti-protons, not oxygen and anti-oxygen, so just making a lump of anti-iron and keeping it away from normal iron isn't good enough)

Re:Okay n00b question

[Tablizer]

If you can tell me which ones will be popular in advance, I will spend more time checking the grammer & spelling on the hits, deal?

Re:Okay n00b question

[suv4x4]

Let's put it another way: if there was an anti-sun with an anti-solar system, exactly like Earth but with every particle the inverse of our Earth, they would be exactly the same. (Even when they eventually met and obliterated each other -- matter blows up antimatter just as well as antimatter blows up matter.)

Good news everyone! We're off to the other side of the universe to collect positrons!

Re:Okay n00b question

[gtall]

Think of matter as a politician and antimatter as truth. A politician cannot hold truth without being totally annihilated in a orgasm of Klieg lights and profuse sweating.

Gerry

Re:Okay n00b question

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no way to tell from the light - photons are the same whether generated by matter or antimatter.

No, they are not. Antimatter annihilation events produce photons in a regular geometry. These gamma rays can be detected by their geometry and filtered from experimental data.

In particular, when positron-electron pairs annihilate they produce two photons with opposite velocity vectors. This geometry is utilised in positron emission tomography to obtain positional data by using anti-coincidence detectors, much as they are used in anti-coincidence gamma ray spectroscopy to reduce Compton background.

Regardless, the applications of antimatter in cancer therapy are extremely limited, antimatter does not care whether a cell is cancerous or not, it will form matter-antimatter annihilation pairs with the first suitable particles it encounters.

Re:Okay n00b question

[Sobrique]

Mutual anhiliation seems like 'things dissolve' until people grasp the point of E=MC^2.

I seem to recall a kilo of antimatter, if it came into contact with matter, would be sufficient to boil lake michigan.

It's literally the most efficient way of storing energy - rather than 'burning' wood, and getting some ashes, and smoke, or fusion reactions producing secondary elements, all the mass in the matter/anti-matter reaction converts directly into energy.

Which is a rather large quantity, for a relatively small amount of mass, and why it does so very well in Sci-Fi.

At the moment, however, antimatter isn't so much produced by the kilo, as by one atom at a time. And not very efficiently either. (Those particle accelerators have insane electric bills :))

Re:Okay n00b question

[iago-vL]

Let's put it another way: if there was an anti-sun with an anti-solar system, exactly like Earth but with every particle the inverse of our Earth, they would be exactly the same. (Even when they eventually met and obliterated each other -- matter blows up antimatter just as well as antimatter blows up matter.)

But wait.... how do we know we are the real matter and they are the anti-matter? Perhaps we've been the anti-matter all along! *creepy music plays*

Re:Okay n00b question

[spun]

Do you have a creepy goatee? The antimatter version of you will always have a creepy goatee, so go look in the mirror, if you've got a creepy goatee, then you are the antimatter version.

Re:Okay n00b question

[schnipschnap]

There is however something dubbed a Matter-Antimatter Asymmetry (okay, I'm just being search-friendly here); there seems to be a discrepancy in the properties of one particle and its anti-particle somewhere, which seemingly is why the universe is composed of more matter than anti-matter (or even nothing at all). Take this with some caution, I have lost interest in particle physics a long time ago :( Also, I don't think the reasons are understood well.

Re:Okay n00b question

[somepunk]

Yeah, well nearly so. There is the whole question of where those friggin particles came from that created the slashdot editors. And the rest of the universe. I think the figure I saw was about one extra matter particle created for every ten billion matter/antimatter pairs. Google "CP Violation"

Re:But my complete understanding of physics says..

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats the deflector array!

A little pricey

[thyarcher]

Unfortunately, Anti-matter is currently the most expensive substance on the planet. At best it can be manufactured for $25 Billion per gram. I suggest they spend their time on a more practical solution to the cancer problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter_weapon
They might as well say aether can also cure cancer. It would probably be cheaper to discover/create.

Re:A little pricey

[Eric Smith]

It doesn't matter that it costs $25 billion per gram, since the quantities required for treatment are in the nanograms.

A milligram of antimatter would "cure" everyone in the whole city, of whatever ails them.

Re:A little pricey

[Tablizer]

Unfortunately, Anti-matter is currently the most expensive substance on the planet. At best it can be manufactured for $25 Billion per gram.

Oh shit! Something yet more expensive for chicks to expect in trinkets. Fsck the Joneses', she only gits diamonds.

Re:A little pricey

[Roger W Moore]

Yes, however were you to actually use a gram of antimatter to treat a patient you will generate a 42.8 kiloton blast. While this would be certain of destroying all the cancer cells the side effects of this treatment would be a little severe!

Re:A little pricey

[thyarcher]

Unfortunately, the $25B/gram is an ideal price. With the actual production estimates at around 30 nanograms per year by 2020, the best case scenario is a couple hundred treatments by the end of the century. Not too bad, I suppose, for budding new technology, but there are a lot of other development breakthroughs that need to be made before this is even a remote treatment option for the next couple generations. Hopefully our tech accelerates fast enough that next generation's teens are building anti-matter containment chambers for science fairs, but I'm guessing that the technology entrance is a little higher than the boyscout breeder reactors of the present.

Re:A little pricey

[Anonymous Coward]

Source: Your link to Wikipedia

"Even if it were possible to convert energy directly into particle/antiparticle pairs without any loss, a large-scale power plant generating 2000 MWe would take 25 hours to produce just one gram of antimatter. Given the average price of electric power around $50 per megawatt hour, this puts a lower limit on the cost of antimatter at $2.5 million per gram."

Re:A little pricey

[Eric Smith]

That's for production and storage. Production and immediate use (irradiating an object such as a patient) doesn't involve that much operational expense. The big expense is the capital equipment outlay, which has to be amortized over a very large number of treatments.

Re:A little pricey

[Anonymous Coward]

At best it can be manufactured for $25 Billion per gram. I suggest they spend their time on a more practical solution to the cancer problem.

Perhaps it only takes a few nanograms to kill off a tumour? There are drugs that are similarly expensive, but still cost-effective because they're effective in such low doses.

I suspect that they've done a fairly thorough cost analysis already, in any case.

nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Doctor: "ok, just stand right there and hold still for a minute while i fire up the particle accelerator."

Overdosing Kills

[Dr. Eggman]

Time of Death: 2:30pm

Cause: Drug overdose

Location: A little bit over here,little bit over there, and significant portions missing.

Perfect!

[plasmacutter]

exactly what big pharma needs to increase their already record profits!

at 45 billion per pill this cancer "cure" will be flying off the shelves!

Thought Cancer was already Cured

[reezle]

Didn't they already cure cancer with dichloroacetate? http://www.wanderings.net/notebook/Main/CheapSafeD rugKillsMostCancers/
They are going a long ways out of their way to find patentable treatments that are more profitable.

Re:Thought Cancer was already Cured

[DietFluffy]

There hasn't been any clinical trials. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichloroacetic_acid#P otential_cancer_applications

Re:Thought Cancer was already Cured

[plasmacutter]

ahh yes.. we all must thank those benevolent pharma giants...

seriously, that kind of neglect ought to be criminal.

pharma companies are already allowed to benefit by patenting findings from public grants and public universities, they should be kept on a tighter leash.. oh wait this is the corporate states of america, where hundreds of thousands of lives a year are worth it as long as the phizer children can get their fifth lotus.

Re:Thought Cancer was already Cured

[reezle]

Yes, that's kind of the problem it's facing seeing as there no no patent possibilities, therefore no funding to run the clinical trials...
Where are your charity dollars now?

Re:Thought Cancer was already Cured

[plasmacutter]

that was the point of the article he linked in.. apparently because it cant be patented pharmas arent looking at clinical trials.

Re:Thought Cancer was already Cured

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, kick those evil pharmesutical companies. They don't spend *BILLIONS* on frivolous lawsuits or anything. It's not like 1 well publicised mistake isn't enough to destroy the ENTIRE COMPANY.

Re:Thought Cancer was already Cured

[porcupine8]

Except that there are unpatentable cancer treatments in clinical trials all the freaking time. See my post lower in this thread.

Re:Thought Cancer was already Cured

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't they already cure cancer with dichloroacetate?
Yeah, but the only sample was lost, along with a working room temperature fusion prototype, when some dude's flying car got stolen. Sucks. Back to fighting over oil, I guess.

25 Billion per gram = 25 bucks per nanogram

[Chmcginn]

Well, considering that the current crop of particle-beam based cancer treatments being developed is using a stream of protons. If the kinetic impact of high-speed protons is a high enough energy level, than a stream of positrons would do the trick nicely... and considering that PET is already used in medicine, I doubt the increase in the amount of positrons needed would be (that big of a) cost factor. (At least not compared to the cost of the actual trials.)

Re:25 Billion per gram = 25 bucks per nanogram

[Eric Smith]

If the kinetic impact of high-speed protons is a high enough energy level, than a stream of positrons would do the trick nicely

What ever gave you that idea? A positron has the same charge as a proton, but much smaller and only 1/1836 the mass of the proton. It would be quite a challenge to get the same kinetic energy from positrons.

and considering that PET is already used in medicine, I doubt the increase in the amount of positrons needed would be (that big of a) cost factor

The positrons in PET come from decay of a radioisotope. Generating them in sufficient quantity to be a suitable alternative to a proton or antiproton beam would require a much different production method.

Re:25 Billion per gram = 25 bucks per nanogram

[ceoyoyo]

In PET you don't inject positrons. It's positron EMISSION tomography. You inject a substance that, when it decays, emits positrons, then they quickly run into an electron and annihilate, producing two gamma rays, which you detect.

These story is about using anti-protons (very different than positrons) and they're using a beam (well, more than one beam for an actual treatment) of reasonably slow ones. As stated in the article, there are really only a couple of places in the world that can produce such a beam and the equipment to do it is very large.

In contrast, for PET you just need a cyclotron (costs a few million) to make the radio pharmaceuticals for you. My hospital is installing one. But they're not going to be making anti-proton beams any time soon.

Re:25 Billion per gram = 25 bucks per nanogram

[Chmcginn]

If the kinetic impact of high-speed protons is a high enough energy level, than a stream of positrons would do the trick nicely

What ever gave you that idea? A positron has the same charge as a proton, but much smaller and only 1/1836 the mass of the proton. It would be quite a challenge to get the same kinetic energy from positrons.

You don't need to - the whole point is that the positrons are going to be annihilate themselves & some of the electrons in the target cell, and therefore you need less mass & velocity to put the same amount of energy into the target.

Re:25 Billion per gram = 25 bucks per nanogram

[Eric Smith]

But a positron annihilating an electron releases only 1/1836th the energy of an antiproton annihilating a proton. Antimatter isn't magic; you need more antimatter mass to get more energy release.

Somewhere in a parallel universe...

[Waffle Iron]

...antimatter beings have just discovered that cancer may be treatable with particles of ordinary matter.

Re:Somewhere in a parallel universe...

[GrievousMistake]

We should totally trade them some.
Now, just to seal the deal with a firm handshake...

Re:Somewhere in a parallel universe...

[Bo'Bob'O]

Goatee trimming technology still remains elusive.

Re:Somewhere in a parallel universe...

[Wooster_UK]

I thought that was here...

Parity errors: dontcha just love 'em?

Re:Somewhere in a parallel universe...

[cowboy76Spain]

The only difference is that they call it anti-antimatter

Problem with ./ cancer reports simplified ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Case 1: Killing Cancer Cells = Good
Case 2: Killing Normal Cells = Bad
Case 3: Killing Cancer Cells AND Killing Normal Cells = Bad

All too often the cancer studies that get reported here deal only with case 1

Hope commerical use reduces costs..

[QuantumG]

of manufacturing antimatter.. cause there's only one thing more simple to build than a rocket engine, and that's an antimatter rocket engine. The potential for space technology is enormous.. if only antimatter didn't cost so damn much.

So how do we administer it?

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Antimatter sucks up anything it touches.

Doctor: "Nurse, please fix me up a syringe full of antimatter!"

Nurse: "Sure thing doc." Goes into store room. Clattering sound...

Doctor: "Now where the hell did she go!"

Re:So how do we administer it?

[MadnessASAP]

I believe what you're thinking about black holes Antimatter annihilates anything it touches along with itself in a 1:1 ratio releasing E=MC^2 amount of energy. PS I guess that makes using antimatter to remove a 1 lb tumor the equivalent of setting off a nuke then?

Re:So how do we administer it?

[MillionthMonkey]

They introduce the antitumor and it annihilates the tumor.

Although they have to be careful not to damage the surrounding tissue. This means avoiding use of antimuscles, anticonnective tissue, antibones, antilivers, and antibrains.

Re:So how do we administer it?

[armareum]

They're just causing enough damage to lead to cell death, it's not complete annihilation of the tumour.

Re:So how do we administer it?

[miyako]

for most people, shouldn't it be "...antibones, antilivers, brains"?

Re:So how do we administer it?

[glock22ownr]

You want me to stand on what end of this thing ???

I found a cure, too.

[Nullav]

We'll just take a plasma welder to the affected area. Aside from being relatively quick, it's also cost-effective.

penis

[Anonymous Coward]

haha "penis"

Atomic physicists?

[Aardpig]

Atomic physicists work on electron structure of atoms -- not on subatomic particles. You'd think being a techie site that Slashdot wouldn't get its science wrong so often; but it seems the fucktard editors always let the side down.

Re:Atomic physicists?

[Dersaidin]

General Science and technology terminology 101 for slashdot editors

Bones

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn it Jim, I'm a doctor, not a warp core engineer!

Re:Bones

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn it Jim, I'm a doctor, not a warp core engineer!

Good one! Thanks for the chuckle.

Re:silly idea

[Eric Smith]

You might try actually reading the article before spouting off. No, wait, this is Slashdot. What was I thinking?

Misleading photo

[Roger W Moore]

The photo shown in the article is that of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which will (when operational) circulate two beams of protons at 7 TeV. The total energy in the beam is 360MJ so I really doubt that you will want to use that to cure a brain tumour....although if you did I suppose it would be the first time where particle physics literally made someone's head explode!

Re:Misleading photo

[Anonymous Coward]

This is offtopic i know, but what would happen if a biological object was to be placed in front of a LHC beam? my understanding is that it will fire a particle at almost light speed... but is the fired particle small enough to pass through the biological matter ?

Re:Misleading photo

[Ihlosi]

but is the fired particle small enough to pass through the biological matter ? Looking at one particle is fairly meaningless.

Some particles will hit stuff inside the target (depending on density, thickness, atomic makeup and such) and be scattered/absorbed, some will hit nothing and emerge at the other end.

Re: Indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

When a large hardon experiences a collision, a head does explode.

Antimatter Enema

[hirschma]

Colon cancer victims are going to give the command "jettison the warp core" a new meaning...

Re:Antimatter Enema

[Anonymous Coward]

> Colon cancer victims are going to give the command "jettison the warp core" a new meaning...

"Captain! We're losing containment!! Anticipating core breach in 30 seconds... quick, beam me to the lavatory!"

How?

[Coucho]

How would they be able to store antimatter? Wouldn't it just eliminate itself with normal matter?

Re:How?

[FusionDragon2099]

Antimatter is stored in a vacuum where there is no normal matter.

Re:How?

[Anonymous Coward]

How are you going to contain the anti-matter in the vacuum without ever touching the container??
So, here are the possible scenario.
1) all the anti-matter used are charged particles of the same kind (anti-protons, positrons, and the likes).
2) all the anti-matter used are anti-atoms (or anti-molecules).

In 1), while you may be able to contain one particle suspended in the middle of vacuum by electrical and magnetic field, once you have more than one charged particle, it would be very difficult to keep them together in the same container, as each of those particles will repell each other.

In 2), at that point, what you have is a neutral particle, therefore, you won't be able to contain in one location. Sooner or later, it will touch the vessel containing them. So, clearly this won't work.

For the anti-matter cancer treatment to work, you will have to work with an accelerator and they need to be produced on site, and used for a treatment there. This isn't all that hard, as there are several accelerator facilities in the world that is capable of producing anti-matter (for example, KEKB in Japan has been colliding electron and positron, and Tevatron at Fermi Lab has been colliding protons and anti-protons).

Close enough

[arth1]

Kilotonnes of TNT, to be precise.

e = mc^2, m = 2g (it reacts to an equal amount of matter), c=299792458 m/s
e = 179751035747363.528 kg*m^2/s^2 = 179.751 TJ
1 kT TNT = 4.184 TJ

179.751 / 4.184 = 42.96 littul kittons.

For comparison, Little Boy, which was dropped over Hiroshima was around 11-13 kT TNT equivalent. Yes, antimatter is potent stuff, but for effect of small doses, I'd rather go with tryptamines myself.

Regards,
--
*Art

Re:Close enough

[Rosonowski]

LSD, perhaps, being effective as low as 75ug, but other tryptamines such as Psylocibin are only really effective around 10+mg.

The only reason I know this being that I lived with a biochem grad student for a year, and he liked to read up on the stuff. *shrugs*

hold on a second...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't anti matter annihilations release all sorts of EM and heat radiation in large amounts...

the total mass of both the matter and anitmatter is turned into pure energy (E=mc^2) so effectively you have double the weight of your cancer being converted to mass times the speed of light squared worth of energy...

more radiation being released into the body = more cancer?

who the fuck wants that kind of EM sent directly into their body? you'd kill the cancer for sure but it would grow back in no time at all and since the effects of EM radiation on the body are still highly unknown (as apposed to nuclear radiation which we, george bush included, know a fair bit about) i dont think this is a practical 'cure' for cancer

Re:silly idea

[Falstius]

According to the article, the higher selectivity was one of the advantages over traditional proton irradiation (I suspect because you could use lower energy particles but the article is light on details and I'm just guessing). That said, I worked at CERN for a few years, and I certainly wouldn't put it past people there to aggrandize some experiment to bring in more funds. But this happens in every research field, even medicine. CERN, the birthplace of the web, also has a department of industry liaison which is responsible for selling spin-off technologies to companies, to get some return on the publics investment.

taking people for a ride

[vparkash]

the research is completely bogus..... antimatter is a very unstable substance that cannot survive in our universe, because it combines with matter and both annihilate each other... for example an electron and a positron on combining mutually annihilate & produce photons.... In this regard anti matter can kill normal cells too with equal efficacy. Since there is no selectivity in this, it is as good or bad as radio therapy.. another thing, antimatter can be produced thru nuclear reactions only...so you can worry about things like nuclear laws, terrorists etc.

Re:taking people for a ride

[Anonymous Coward]

antimatter can be produced thru nuclear reactions only

you mean subatomic reactions right?

nuclear reactions involve the nucleus of an atom... where as antimatter can be/is made by colliding tiny sub atomic particles (smaller than electrons) at near the speed of light. Both particles have to be traveling towards each other - there is no nucleus involved.

quite simply a nucleus is too big (protons have mass) to be propelled fast enough to create the kind of reaction used to give birth to our little anti sub atomic particle friends

Re:taking people for a ride

[vparkash]

We broadly classify reactions into chemical and nuclear.....there's nothing official about the term "sub-atomic" reactions. Anyway.... scientists have created "Anti-Hydrogen".....although I'm not aware of any other antimatter nuclei

Re:taking people for a ride

[thrawn_aj]

the research is completely bogus..... antimatter is a very unstable substance that cannot survive in our universe, because it combines with matter and both annihilate each other... for example an electron and a positron on combining mutually annihilate & produce photons.... In this regard anti matter can kill normal cells too with equal efficacy. Since there is no selectivity in this, it is as good or bad as radio therapy.. another thing, antimatter can be produced thru nuclear reactions only...so you can worry about things like nuclear laws, terrorists etc. The blanket statements I have read so far are contrary to the facts. Surely you folks have heard of PET scans (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PET_scan), a quite ordinary procedure these days? Well, PET stands for positron emission tomography, a really cool mapping technique which is based on low doses of a radioisotope that's chemically incorporated into a sugar being injected into the body. Based on the sugar properties (these can presumably be tailored to the purpose at hand), it then concentrates in areas of interest (there's your selectivity :P). The neat thing is how the annihilation takes place. When a positron gets near an electron, they don't actually get destroyed right away. For one thing, it's highly improbable that the expectation values of their momenta are precisely directed toward each other.

What we get then is actually a great example of an "exotic atom" - the two mirror particles form an unstable "atom" called positronium which is extremely short-lived and which decays into two photons going at 180 degrees to each other. This is important because that is the only way you can detect such an annihilation taking place. At any rate, my point is that this is hardly a "high-energy" application as so many science hacks have sneeringly pointed out here so far. Radiology is an established field of medicine and one reason it is so is because radioisotopes can be made so damn selective (tracers anyone? :P).

Re:taking people for a ride

[freeze128]

You can cure cancer by listening to the radio? What station?

Re:taking people for a ride

[aadvancedGIR]

Yes, antimatter is unstable and hard to stock, so that's the big problem with that technique, treated people will have to go to a particule accelerator to be treated instead of a normal hospital.

Yes, antimatter can kill any kind of cell, but there are funny things about that kind of physics that basically says that if you throw the antimatter with the right energy, it will require x cm of flesh to slow it down enough before it can react with regular matter. So if you configure the system correctly, the great majority of the antimatter will explode at a very localized point and generate radiations that will be almost totally absorbed by a small volume of flesh (inj the order of cubic millimeters), so there is a very good spacial selectivity with that kind of technique.

And to be honest, I'm not very worried about a terrorist group trying to steal or smuggle a particule accelerator wheighting millions of tons and putting GW in it to get picograms of antimatter.

Re:taking people for a ride

[thrawn_aj]

You can cure cancer by listening to the radio? What station? WOMG 42 :P

Re:But my complete understanding of physics says..

[Anonymous Coward]

Comment was funny untill "...or am I mixing up TV with reality again? :-)"

Re:This wont work.

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't put antimater in your pocket. You create it with an accelerator and target the particles onto the tumors. Anti-protons are much more difficult to make than protons.

Nice conspiracy theory, pity about the holes.

[porcupine8]

That claims that there are no clinical trials primarily because the drug is already in use and therefore not re-patentable.

How do you explain clinical trials that utilize drugs whose patents have already expired? Such as this chemo regimen, which was in clinical trials just in the past couple of years despite several of the drugs being unpatentable. (I don't think they're giving out any new patents for prednisone and mustard gas these days.)

Sorry to interrupt. Back to your regularly scheduled Raging Against The Big Bad Pharmaceutical Machine.

Yet another stupid headline

[labradore]

TFA discusses highly energetic ions from cyclotrons and synchrotrons used for treatment. The equipment would cost as much as $200M to install per hospital. Treating 2000 patients a year for ten years would cost about $10K per patient just for the equipment, not including labor, overhead, etc!

The last couple sentences in the article were thrown in offhandedly mentioning that **someday, maybe** someone could theoretically use antimatter to treat cancer. You know how much that stuff costs? According to wikipedia, $1 x 10^18 (One Quintillion) per gram. Granted, you might only need a few pico- or nanograms to treat cancer, so that's between a $10M and $100K per treatment. By the way, in the past 25 years our worldwide annual production of the stuff worldwide has basically not increased. It's no where near enough for using medically.

So yea, you could treat cancer with antimatter... if you're the sort of person who also swats flies with nuclear weapons.

Re:Yet another stupid headline

[26199]

$10K per patient is not a lot of money.

The UK government has paid up to 48,000GBP ($92K) to save someone for a "year" (as they count it -- quality of life measures etc). According to that article 20,000GP ($38K) is easy to justify for giving someone a year more life. So if you can actually cure a patient -- meaning they live considerably longer -- it's worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, at least.

And that's before private health cover.

Re:Yet another stupid headline

[jacobw]

The equipment would cost as much as $200M to install per hospital. Treating 2000 patients a year for ten years would cost about $10K per patient just for the equipment, not including labor, overhead, etc!

Yes, but based on my extensive study of results published in the peer-reviewed medical journals of Marvel and DC, a large percentage of those 2000 patients would not only be cured but would develop uncanny superpowers. If only one of those patients then goes on to prevent terrorists from a fictional-but-realistic-sounding Middle Eastern country from blowing up a $300 million dam, the program will have paid for itself!

The only tricky part is, before treating patients with brain conditions, we'd have to make sure that none of them had taken damage to the crucial Not Being An Evil Genius portions of the brain. We wouldn't want a situation where the very same incident that creates a hero also happens to create his villainous arch enemy.

Re:Yet another stupid headline

[labradore]

I agree, most people are willing to pay $10k to not die. People will do anything to save their lives. However, once the hospitals and the HMO's and all of the bureaucracy gets its part of the pie, the $10k treatment is really more like $40k or $50k. Modern hospital healthcare is wildly inefficient. Granted, you would pay that $40k or $50k to save your own life if you had it, but are you interested in increasing your health insurance payments a couple of percent so that a few thousand people can get less harmful cancer treatment? Most business owners aren't interested in having higher insurance payments. Bean counters aren't going to go for this until the price comes down and it becomes more universally useful.

Reo-virus may kill 2/3 of all cancers.

[fahrbot-bot]

It's finding the things that kill exclusively cancer cells that's the hard part.

You mean like this...

Reo-virus, or respiratory enteric orphan virus, is naturally occurring and believed to cause mild infections of the upper respiratory and gastro-intestinal tract in humans. However, in testing mice with implanted human cancer tumours, Lee and his team of researchers were able to show that reo-virus also has the ability to selectively kill a wide variety of cancer cells.

...Lee's findings have indicated that approximately two thirds of cancers cells bear an active Ras pathway and the remaining cells can be treated with a particular chemical to deactivate their anti-bodies against viruses.

If only treatments like these were ready in 2005... My wife of 20 years was diagnosed with a brain tumor (GBM) Thanksgiving 2005 and died in January 13, 2006. Nothing is special any more...

Re:no poisons or radiation is required to cure can

[porcupine8]

But of course there is no money to be made by telling people all they have to do is follow the proper diet

WTF? Tell that to the late Dr. Atkins. Hell, there are plenty of books out there now specifically about treating cancer through diet (though most are responsible enough to view it as a supplement to rather than replacement for traditional therapies), and they sell. If your dad had any actual proof, trust me, he'd be a rich man.

Anti-matter in motion

[fahrbot-bot]

It annihilates matter when it comes into contact with it, releasing a burst of energy.

My understanding [which I admit is limited and may actually be completely lacking :-)] is that the anti-matter particles annihilate contacting matter when at (or close to) rest.

The idea for use in medical treatment is to propel anti-matter at such velocity so as to pass harmlessly through the body and to come to rest within the tumor, thus annihilating matter at that point.

Was I even close? (Be nice, I tried.)

First the Web Server, Now antimatter POC

[mrkitty]

Is there anything Cern can't do?

Re:First the Web Server, Now antimatter POC

[Anonymous Coward]

you certainly can't dis CERN (for) what they can't do.

You know what else can kill cancer cells...

[cyberanth]

...bullets. Also, is it really a surprise that you can kill cancer by obliterating it with antimatter? It's not made of special cancer baryons.

Re:You know what else can kill cancer cells...

[geekoid]

It would v=be a suprise that we can do it and have the patient live.

Of course they're not actually using anti-matter, only using the device that makes anti-matter.

Re:silly idea

[Just Some Guy]

we already have plenty of toxic compounds that kill cells just fine.

How many of those compounds are 100% guaranteed to completely disappear the instant they're done poisoning the target cells?

Re:silly idea

[bcrowell]

The real problem isn't toxicity, it is selectivity. How do you kill cancer cells without killing the entire organism?
And if you'd read the article, you'd understand that that's exactly the advantage of antiprotons.

Re:no poisons or radiation is required to cure can

[ShinmaWa]

You are dead wrong. Cancer is really caused by subluxations in the spine, restricting the flow of the body's energies. The cure, of course, is a series simple manual adjustments that allow the body's energies to properly flow and cure the disease. It's as simple as that. Your nutritionist quackery is an obvious attempt to make money while ignoring that has been known all along by chiropractors!

Re:This wont work.

[ceoyoyo]

Didn't read the article, did you?

b) Same way you do with current proton beam treatments. Shoot a beam of them at the cancer. Make it several beams, that converge on the tumor.

c) No, actually it works quite well. Radiotherapy is very common. Anti-protons are just another type.

d) No more than any other type of radiotherapy. Actually, less so. That's the point of the article.

a) is your only real point, but only the first word. Antimatter is hard to store, so you can't ship it around like you can with long half life radio-pharmaceuticals. The equipment to make it is really big, so you can't just manufacture the stuff right in the hospital like you can with short half-llife radio-pharmaceuticals. The only option is to bring the patients to the accelerator.

why it makes sense

[bcrowell]

First off, heavy ion beams make sense as a way of treating cancer. The reason is that when a heavy ion passes through matter, it decelerates along a straight-line path, and deposits a very large percentage of its energy near the very end of its path. If you compare with x-rays as a radiation treatment, x-rays deposit energy in an exponential-decay pattern, so if you're treating a brain tumor with a pencil beam of x-rays, the tissue that gets hit with the most radiation is the skin, followed by the skull, followed by the good parts of the brain, followed by the tumor. Now in reality you don't use a pencil beam, you use a focused beam, so it's not quite that bad, but focusing also works with heavy ion beams (I believe you actually rotate the patient, not the beam). So with heavy ion beams, you get energy concentrated near the tumor for two different reasons: (a) focusing, and (b) the pattern of energy loss, which is peaked at the end of the trajectory.

OK, now about antimatter. An amazing number of posters apparently (a) haven't read the article, (b) haven't understood the article, or (c) don't know enough physics to make heads or tails of any of this.

1. Antimatter is the same as matter except that it has the opposite charge.
2. No, you don't have to handle samples of it. They make antiprotons in a particle accelerator, and in the experiment, they delivered it to a sample of hamster cells suspended in gelatin. You'd just put the patient in the beam of the accelerator. This has already been done with beams of protons on real patients. There's absolutely no difference, in principle, between delivering a beam of protons to the tumor and delivering a beam of antiprotons.
3. Yes, antimatter is the most expensive stuff ever made. No, that isn't particularly relevant, because you're not feeding it to the patient in gram quantities.
4. At present, there is no dedicated medical facility where patients could get exposed to a beam of antiprotons, and there may never be. What you'd have to do, for the foreseeable future, is bring your patient to a particle acclerator, get him some beam time, and place him on the receiving end of the beam. Although beam time is incredibly expensive, it's not necessarily true that you'd have to pay for 1 hour of beam time in order to give the patient 1 hour of treatment. There may be times when the accelerator is being tested, and the beam would otherwise just be wasted. There may be times when someone is doing an experiment with 1 femtoamp of antiprotons, but they can spare 0.01 femtoamps of their beam to be diverted to the patient. Or there may be times when it's just not possible to book 100% of the available beam time for physics experiments (e.g., something goes wrong with an experiment, and they can't use the rest of their beamtime).
5. The reason a beam of antiprotons is four times more effective than a beam of protons is that after the antiproton delivers a bunch of energy through electrical interactions with electrons, it then annihilates itself with one of the protons in a nucleus in the tumor. This is such an energetic process that I imagine every single proton and neutron in that nucleus goes zipping off separately, with energies in the MeV range. These neutrons and protons then deposit their energy in the tumor as well.

Re:why it makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Besides, feeding a gram of anitmatter to a patient would release 180TJ of energy. Enough cover all the worlds energy needs for roughly 12 seconds, or about the same amount as burning about 6 million litres of gasoline.

Oh, and before anyone goes and gets a good idea; producing 1 g of anti-matter at the current rate takes about a billion years, so dont go selling your oil company stock just yet.

Re:why it makes sense

[bo-eric]

x-rays deposit energy in an exponential-decay pattern, so if you're treating a brain tumor with a pencil beam of x-rays, the tissue that gets hit with the most radiation is the skin, followed by the skull, followed by the good parts of the brain, followed by the tumor

Well, no, not really. Electrons deposit energy like you described. Indirectly ionizing radiation, such as high energy gamma radiation have an effect called "build-up", which makes it deposit its maximum amount of energy at a depth. 20 MV bremsstrahlung gamma radiation (in common usage) has its depth-dose maximum about 3 - 4 cm into the tissue -- quite useful for the brain tumours you talk about. Deeper than that (in the charged-particle equilibrium region), they are attenuated pretty much exponentially.

Re:why it makes sense

[Goaway]

Welcome to Slashdot, where your actually informative post is buried far down on the page of comments where nobody will ever see it, because everybody's busy posting nonsense in reply to first few posts.

Re:This wont work.

[bcrowell]

a) Read the article. b) Read the article. c) Read the article. d) Read the article.

Ernest Orlando Lawrence

[IHC Navistar]

This reminds me of how Lawrence discovered how to use his newly built cyclotron to treat his mother's cancer, and thus created the field of radiation therapy.

Long story short.....

He sat her down in a chair in front of the cyclotron he had just finished building and placed her knee in front of the exit end.

I read this in a book somewhere a long, long time ago, and think I might have my facts mixed up, but I'm pretty sure that's how it went.

Kinda funny ho some of the most advanced medical procedures has such amazingly simple beginnings.

Cancer vs. the world

[quickgold192]

I have come to realize that every new technology can be (and will be) applied toward the cure for cancer.

Re:Cancer vs. the world

[aadvancedGIR]

Don't worry, every new technology will also be applied to mass murder civilians, err fight terrorism. Sleep well little child.

Re:Cancer vs. the world

[plasmacutter]

not to nit pick.. but traction control hasn't been applied to fighting cancer..

i've never seen a sentence reading: "by applying the traction controlled tire to the affected area, we've noticed marked diminshment of tumor size"

Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone read Dan Brown's book, Angels and Demons?

According to that Antimatter + Matter equates to boom...

P.S. Yeah, yeah, I know it's fiction don't bite my head off.

Re:Hmm...

[Adhemar]

There is some truth in Dan Browns books, but he does make a lot of mistakes. They can be quite irritating to me when I'm reading his books.

Yes, antimatter + matter equates to boom.

In the book, Dan Brown states that a gram of antimatter meeting matter would result in a boom was 20 kiloton, the equivalent of the atom bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

In explosions, a kiloton refers to the explosive release energy of an explosing of a kiloton of TNT, which is 4.2 x 10^12 joule. If you calculte E=mc^2, you'll find that a gram of matter (or antimatter) has the potential to release 90 terajoule, which is 21.4 kiloton. So Dan Brown was about right, you would think.

Actually, he wasn't. When a gram of antimatter meets matter, both the gram of antimatter and the gram of matter annihilate. So the explosive release of energy is twice as large: 42.8 kiloton.

Startling revelation!

[Trails]

It turns out, blowing up and irradiating cells kills them! And you thought science didn't accomplish anything.

I Cured Cancer!

[Tablizer]

It just dawned on me: the solution to curing cancer is to cross it with anti-cancer!

Re:no poisons or radiation is required to cure can

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

no, you are wrong. Cancer is caused being born at the wrong time. This page proves my point.

Re:Reo-virus may kill 2/3 of all cancers.

[Linker3000]

Now, there's 'being a jerk' or submitting some daft comments under the protection of the AC account and there's just being unnecessarily offensive. Everyone is entitled to be a jerk sometimes, but most retain a degree of respect and maturity when they do it. Shame on you.

No, theyre just spending billions on lobbying..

[plasmacutter]

to prevent you buying cheaper canadian versions, to prevent people in developing nations who are incapable of paying from being able to save their lives.. don't defend the corrupt just because they do a little good.. remember al capone ran soup kitchens too.

Re:Reo-virus may kill 2/3 of all cancers.

[dreamchaser]

Try posting on a non AC account next time. Oh that's right, you are a coward so you won't.

I *almost* hope *you* suffer a terrible loss, but two wrongs don't make a right.

People like you are good for society in a way though. You're a doctoral dissertation waiting to happen for some lucky psychology major.

They are NOT using Anti-matter

[styryx]

Disclaimer: Physicist.

E=mc^2, anyone? Anti-matter would be impossible to use here.

The misconception arises in that the methods used to create anti-matter (i.e. particle accelerators) are being employed in order to treat cancer. Think of it more as a particle beam treatment. Instead of using X-rays, they are using ion-beams to target the cancer. This reduces collateral damage by orders of magnitude and so is an extremely good alternative to Chemotherapy. NB: It is not a cure; at least not at this stage. There is more news to come next week from the same people, btw... good news!

Please can someone change the article to correct that anti-matter is not being used.

Re:They are NOT using Anti-matter

[NewKimAll]

Exactly! Besides, anti-matter is supposed to explode the moment it comes in contact with any form of matter including the gas surrounding us we call air.

Even if you could deliver anti-matter down a syringe needle, how big and powerful would the magnet have to be to make sure it didn't touch the sides of the needle? I'm guessing pretty darn big. Hence, I don't believe you can zap cancer directly with anti-matter. We should focus on nanobots getting rid of cancer for us, among a vast amount of other things, such as mending broken bones in a matter of days.
--
Anti-matter, it's not just for warp engines anymore.

Re:They are NOT using Anti-matter

[onx]

Neither you, nor the grandparent here seems to understand what is going on here.

Grandparent, you claim to be a physicist, and then go on to say "E=mc^2, anyone? Anti-matter would be impossible to use here." Just because you've read a few issues of Scientific American doesn't make you any more a physicist than my mother. What does that statement even mean? When I read it I think, "Oh he's trying to say that because of the equivalence of mass and energy, and the fact that the annihilation of mass releases a lot of energy, that such a reaction is too energetic to take place inside the body safely...but this isn't exactly a very convincing argument. Do you know what the rest mass of an electron is, or what the rest mass of an proton is? I think not...you can probably look it up somewhere if you're too lazy to figure it out on your own.

"Even if you could deliver anti-matter down a syringe needle, how big and powerful would the magnet have to be to make sure it didn't touch the sides of the needle? I'm guessing pretty darn big. Hence, I don't believe you can zap cancer directly with anti-matter. We should focus on nanobots getting rid of cancer for us, among a vast amount of other things, such as mending broken bones in a matter of days."

I don't even know what to say to this...honestly, I'm stunned. By the way, I haven't read the preprint issues of Phys. Rev. Lett. was there an article in there talking about a crazy breakthrough in nanobots? Oh wait, that's right...no one is even the slightest bit fucking close to a nanobot that can find and kill cancer, mend bones, etc. We defiantly should just forget about all the people dying of disease in THIS century and focus on making nanobots so that maybe in a few hundred years we can use them!

One effin gram?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

A fucking *gram*? Are you insane?

With the energy conversion factor in question, that would in *no* way constitute anything resembling a cure, or at least nothing that wouldn't be more cheaply done with a tactical nuclear strike..

spend it on research instead

[oohshiny]

Radiation treatment for cancer is a desperate measure, something doctors do because they don't really know how to treat the actual cancer.

At $200-$300 million (!) per particle accelerator, capable of treating about 2000 patients per year, it seems doubtful to me that this is actually worth it.

Successes in non-radiation cancer treatments shows that through studying cancers and the underlying mechanisms, researchers can come up with targeted, rational treatments. Every single one of those particle accelerators translates into a cancer research lab. In the long run, far more patients are likely going to be cured if we spend money on cancer research and making it attractive for people to choose careers in biomedical research, rather than particle accelerators.

Re:spend it on research instead

[fluffy666]

In combination with surgery and sometimes chemotherapy, radiation does offer significant improvements in cure and long term survival rates. Yes, it's a blunt tool, but what are we meant to do - refuse to offer patients anything that is not a 100% cure?

Re:spend it on research instead

[Anonymous Coward]

You're probably questioning the costs because you have no idea what having cancer is like.

dword

Oops, I missed...

[MikeTheMan]

...and hit your face. I hope you didn't really need that.

Re:silly idea

[Rutulian]

Thanks for pointing that out, but I don't believe it for one second. Radiation is radiation. Matter is matter. I know what the article says, but unless they have developed some sort of magical anti-matter beam, this does not solve the problem of selectivity. You can already narrow the exposure radius with standard chemotherapy. And with radioisotopic dyes, you can target to specific areas in the body (ex: thyroid). Yet another means to generate radiation that kills cells does nothing to advance the selectivity that has already been achieved.

Re:silly idea

[Ihlosi]

Thanks for pointing that out, but I don't believe it for one second.

Radiation is radiation. Matter is matter.

So alpha radiation would be ... ?

I know what the article says, but unless they have developed some sort of magical anti-matter beam, this does not solve the problem of selectivity.

It does, to some degree. Different types of radiation have different energy distribution characteristics when they hit the body. Alpha particles pretty much deposit all of their energy within the first few millimeters of tissue (maybe even less), Xrays drop off exponentially and/or are scattered by bones, and some types of particle radiation deliver most of the energy at a point that is a few cm inside the body. Antimatter radiation is one such type.

If you can make sure that the tumor you want to kill is precisely those few cm inside the body, you can kill it fairly selectively without depositing too much energy in healthy tissue.

Too late

[palladiate]

http://www.yog-sothoth.com/modules.php?name=Review s&rop=showcontent&id=24

Check it out, Baby's First Cthulhu.

do the numbers... that's well worth it

[2008]

200000000 dollars divided by (2000 patients per year times 20 years of operation) equals 5000 dollars per patient!

Considering only the vast positive economic impact of getting a cancer sufferer out of hospital where they're costing money and into the labour pool where they're making it a cancer treatment would be worth it at a much higher price.

Re:do the numbers... that's well worth it

[Ihlosi]

200000000 dollars divided by (2000 patients per year times 20 years of operation) equals 5000 dollars per patient!

You forgot the costs to actually run the thing.

Re:Reo-virus may kill 2/3 of all cancers.

[Laxitive]

What the fuck is wrong with posting as an AC?

You want to follow up on his story and verify or something?

Who knows, maybe he IS some random troll, and he made it up. That could very well be the case... but why the fuck do you care? Leave well enough alone, busybody.

Re:Reo-virus may kill 2/3 of all cancers.

[Laxitive]

Dammit, sorry. Thought you were replying to the GP, not the parent.

God, the lines that /. uses to delineate thread structure are fucking useless.. especially the automatic culling of -1 troll posts so it magically looks like you're replying to the wrong person.

Thank you slashdot, for setting the bar so low: your sacrifice elevates the status of all other websites.

Antimatter

[Ikyaat]

'Cancer cells were successfully targeted with anti-matter subatomic particles, causing intense biological damage leading to cell death.' AWESOME!! finally my anti matter death ray is being used for Good...Gliven!

not really

[oohshiny]

No, sorry, that calculation doesn't work. There are plenty of similar cancer treatments available. The question is what number of patients per year have a meaningfully better outcome because of this treatment compared to existing, much cheaper treatments, and that number is likely to be small.

More importantly, the $300m that this costs is gone once it's spent: it treats a fixed number of patients, nothing more. In contrast, if you spend the same $300m on research, you generate knowledge and treatments that will benefit patients indefinitely.

Re:not really

[2008]

No, sorry, that calculation doesn't work. There are plenty of similar cancer treatments available. The question is what number of patients per year have a meaningfully better outcome because of this treatment compared to existing, much cheaper treatments, and that number is likely to be small. What, like, 2000 people per year for instance?

Yes, research is better long term. However, if you always spend 100 percent of your funding on research for those long term benefits no one is ever treated. You have to spend money on treatment at some point.

As for the other person's point about running costs. OK, assume it costs 10 million a year. So, it's now 10 thousand dollars a patient - that's still a good deal. If it were provided commercially and I needed it I'd pay that much.

Re:not really

[oohshiny]

What, like, 2000 people per year for instance?

All of those 2000 people could be treated effectively using existing treatments, probably with about comparable outcomes.

Yes, research is better long term. However, if you always spend 100 percent of your funding on research for those long term benefits no one is ever treated. You have to spend money on treatment at some point.

Research is already only a small fraction of governmental health treatment expenditures. It needs to get larger, not smaller.

So, it's now 10 thousand dollars a patient - that's still a good deal. If it were provided commercially and I needed it I'd pay that much.

You don't "need" it, since this treatment works like any other radiation treatment. The claimed advantage is that it reduces dosages received by other tissues, but they have not demonstrated that it makes a significant difference in outcomes, or that even if it does, it justifies the added expense. Furthermore, there are many far simpler ways of targeting radiation therapy that don't involve $300m particle accelerators.

Re:not really

[Anonymous Coward]

"they have not demonstrated that it makes a significant difference in outcomes, or that even if it does, it justifies the added expense"

Well, if no-one has demonstrated whether or not the technology is worth the cost then there's no point discussing it, is there?

I'm confused that you're advocating research and yet don't seem to want to research this - as I understand it your objection is purely that it's a treatment instead of a cure. Well, so are lots of useful and beneficial medical procedures. If you had migraine would you refuse painkillers?

Re:not really

[oohshiny]

I'm confused that you're advocating research and yet don't seem to want to research this

RTFA. They can conduct all the research they want; the accelerators for that already exist. In fact, they are using them, they simply haven't shown significant benefits in terms of outcomes yet.

What I don't want them to do is talk about building particle accelerators in every major cancer center for $200m-$300m each because that's mischaracterizing the technology as far more mature than it is.

as I understand it your objection is purely that it's a treatment instead of a cure.

No, my objection is that they have failed to show improved outcomes. Additionally, I'm objecting to characterizing this as a new treatment; this is simply a slightly different form of packaging a known treatment (like Tylenol syrup vs Tylenol capsules).

Most importantly, however, far more flexible ways of targeted radiation treatment for cancer have been, and are being, developed. The proponents of this technology haven't bothered even mentioning them, let alone comparing with them. And it's quite clear that those targeted ways are the future, not particle accelerators, so even when it comes to allocation of research dollars, it's probably actually time to wind down research in that area.

In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics

[internic]

Oh, and before anyone goes and gets a good idea; producing 1 g of anti-matter at the current rate takes about a billion years, so dont go selling your oil company stock just yet.

Probably more importantly, you can gain any net energy this way. Whatever energy would be liberated by annihilating the anti-matter would be less than or equal to the energy required to create it. It could be an energy storage mechanism, but it's not an energy source (unlike getting oil that already exists out of the ground).

Re:no poisons or radiation is required to cure can

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell that to the late Dr. Atkins.

He's dead? How about that: his diet didn't work!

"of course! anti-matter!"

[proidiot]

here is what must have happened:

a scientists went to a bar and got drunk
the scientist asked the bartender "what would be the best way to cure cancer?"
and the bartender said "doing something that would make cancer suddenly not be there."
and thus the answer presented itself: everyone knows,
nothing is better at making things suddenly not be there than anti-matter

Re:Reo-virus may kill 2/3 of all cancers.

[SatanicPuppy]

Yea, my mother died of the same thing last year (she went into surgery a year ago yesterday). Those sorts of treatments are years away at best, and even if they're exceptionally effective, they still may not be set up for killing an aggressive fast spreading cancer like a Glioblastoma Multiforme...Right now those are pretty much universally fatal.

Anyway, it's always easy to say, "Well they should have rushed this thing forward" but the truth of it is, they've cured a lot of types of cancer...in mice. Making the jump to people is not going as well.

hmm sounds like a disruptor weapon to me!

[MrJerryNormandinSir]

Didn't the Klingons have a disruptor weapon based on this technology?
No such seting as stun... it just destroyed cellular structure with
antimatter radiation.

Re:In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamic

[fluffy666]

True, but if you ever want a proper spaceship that can do more than just take off and drift, antimatter would be handy.

Re:In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamic

[internic]

Probably more importantly, you can gain any net energy this way.

Gah! Can't! You can't gain any net energy this way.

That'll teaching me to post just as I'm running out the door.

Re:silly idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Radiation is radiation. Matter is matter.

And with this statement, you've proven that not are you only far too ignorant of basic physics to play a meaningful role in this discussion, but your persistence in your ignorance condemns you to a lifetime of being stupider than everyone around you without ever realizing it. Are you actually like this, or is this some form of advanced trolling?

The fact that you could not only believe something like this as a product of, well, any education system anywhere in the world, and that you could be so incapable of self-correction when the real facts are presented you, makes me cry for you, and for the future.

Please, please stop trying to emulate thought. You're not capable of it, and you demean our species.

That's far too blanket of a statement.

[cascadingstylesheet]

There IS NO SAFE LEVEL FOR IONIZING RADIATION.

That's far too blanket of a statement. Studies show that low-level ionizing radiation either has no effect or lowers mortality.

Maybe not pertinent to this article, but I had to respond to that blanket statement WITH ALL THE CAPS ;)

Re:Reo-virus may kill 2/3 of all cancers.

[Anonymous Coward]

*hug*

I'm sorry.

Re:Reo-virus may kill 2/3 of all cancers.

[Lithdren]

I know the feeling, my father was diagnosed with bone marrow cancer in 2003, died after a long fight with it thanksgiving day 2006. I used to follow such research carefully.

Now..only thing I think of is atleast, others wont lose their loved ones. if only it was soon enough for me.

Re:no poisons or radiation is required to cure can

[Anonymous Coward]

"If your dad had any actual proof, trust me, he'd be a rich man."

  And trust ME.. He does have proof. The people he has saved. Oh sure, some money can be made off books, but I was refering to the billions of dollars the traditional medical community makes off doing things like trying to target the specific cells, yet completely ignore the actual root of the problem.

    In fact, my father has no interest in making money off those who are suffering. If someone is sick, do you charge them money to simply tell them the cure? He is one of the few that is not driven by greed.

How do you make it wait?

[EmbeddedJanitor]

So how do you wait for the antimatter "know" what to anti? Is it clever enough to eat up a tumor and not eat up the nurse that goes to fetch it?

Re:How do you make it wait?

[MadnessASAP]

Thats left as an exercise to the reader.

Re:no poisons or radiation is required to cure can

[porcupine8]

Unfortunately, saving a few people is not adequate proof. Unless he can show that there is little chance that those people would not have improved without his treatment, he doesn't have scientific proof. He has anecdotes. Possibly very interesting anecdotes, but anecdotes nonetheless.

And even if he has no interest in making money off of the suffering, if he had an interest in saving as many lives as possible you'd think he would do what is necessary to support his theories and spread the word.